Technical communication or information design? : a New Zealand perspective : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Masters of Business Studies

This research aims to investigate and analyse current trends in New Zealand technical communication. Specifically, it considers how these trends compare to those evident in the United States of America, where the research shows a contemporary paradigm shift occurring from technical communication to information design. The findings of this research show that New Zealand technical communicators do have the core competencies of information designers and that technical communication in New Zealand is, indeed, undergoing a similar change to that happening internationally, especially in the United States of America. The research methodology of this study uses data from two sources: • Current literature on trends in technical communication and information design • A qualitative survey of New Zealand technical communication practitioners. Current literature in the field describes trends that suggest a shift in the core competencies of contemporary technical communicators. This literature largely emerges from an American context. These trends include: • A need for technical communicators to be part of the iterative design process of products and to be user advocates • A change from paper-based documents to online information • The advent of the Internet • The advent of single sourcing and knowledge management computer tools. This study concludes that technical communicators need a broad range of competencies to adapt to the trends described, and that it is no longer adequate for a professional technical communicator to simply be a good writer and document designer. However, this study also shows that New Zealand practitioners currently do demonstrate the key competencies of information designers, including highly developed skills in problem solving, planning and managing the process of product development, information management, usability testing, while continuing to carry out the more obvious tasks of technical communication, such as writing, audience analysis and document design. The main difference between the American and New Zealand technical communication trends analysed here is that technical communication in New Zealand is just becoming recognised as a profession, whereas in the States it has existed since World War Two (WW2). Because of this historical difference, it seems that New Zealand practitioners are not bound by traditional job titles as their American counterparts are, and also tend to have position designations that are more readily recognised by clients and users, such as "documentation specialist", or "document developer". To date, no formal research on technical communication or information design has been completed in New Zealand. Further research is recommended then, in order to gain a more detailed profile of practitioners and practices. This research could be used to address areas such as training needs and, more widely, could continue to raise awareness of the profession in New Zealand. Further research should focus on gathering information on the geographical distribution of practitioners, profiling tasks, tools and jobs, analysing salaries, and examining potential academic programme profiles that could meet the needs of potential information designers

Phytoplankton periodicity: its motivation, mechanisms and manipulation

This review summarizes some recent work to find a generalized explanation of phytoplankton periodicity in lakes. Much of the observational and experimental evidence is drawn from work centred on the large enclosures (Lund Tubes) installed in Blelham Tarn, English Lake District. Observations on the phytoplankton in the tubes are related to the periodic changes that occur in natural lakes and it is suggested that such changes have common patterns, that they are due to common causes, that they are affected by similar processes and that they are therefore predictable and, potentially, manipulable

Co-guarantor attributes: a systemic approach to evaluating expert support

The paper suggests features of a generic framework which can assist in highlighting good practice as well as revealing shortcomings in expert support for management decision-making. Following the earlier writings of Habermas, I argue that expertise might be identified and considered as a set of �co-guarantor attributes� based upon knowledge constitutive interests. Co-guarantor attributes can be used as a benchmark for evaluation, where affirmative features of expert support can be identified as well as the incidence of �false guarantor� attributes which might be significant in perpetuating costly and unsuccessful intervention

Coping with chronic illness and disability through creative needlecraft

Chronic illness and impairment commonly restrict the individual's access to work and leisure activities. Furthermore, if increasingly dependent upon family care, the individual may experience loss of valued roles and self- esteem. A qualitative study was carried out on the written narratives of 35 women, aged 18 to 87 years. All had acquired a disability or chronic illness in adulthood, and although facing different health problems, they shared needlecraft as a common leisure pursuit. The narratives explored the circumstances in which needlecraft had been adopted as a leisure pursuit, and the personal benefits experienced. Most of the women had taken up this activity in adulthood to cope with the crisis of illness. Needlework activities were commonly viewed as providing a means of managing pain, unstructured time, self-image and reciprocal social roles. The women's accounts confirm the value of creative activity for patients learning to cope with chronic conditions

Towards reframing professional expert support

The paper addresses practical ways of reconfiguring professional expertise in development practice in moving away from the expert as a technocrat. Two projects associated with managing natural resource dilemmas suggest an alternative way of framing intervention involving professional experts providing a more appropriate collaborative learning space for development practice. The paper describes the heuristic devices generated by each project as helpful in bringing out dialectic tensions between practice and understanding, and between systems of interest and situations of interest (or situated problems). Firstly, SLIM (social learning for the integrated management and sustainable use of water at catchment scale) - a European Framework Programme 5 project - exemplifies social learning as a measure of sustainable development. The heuristic illustrates the dependence of sustainability on changes in practice and understanding amongst professionals and other stakeholders as part of concerted - rather than merely individual or even collective - action. Secondly, ECOSENSUS (Electronic/Ecological Collaborative Sensemaking Support System) - a Guyana focused intervention involving several UK universities in collaboration with the University of Guyana and Amerindian community representatives from the North Rupununi wetlands - builds on the SLIM heuristic in supporting the development of practice. Additionally, the ECOSENSUS heuristic provides conceptual space for the interaction between conceptual constructs of distributed stakeholders (that is, systems thinking) including those with professional expertise, and the actual context of intervention (the situated problem). Both SLIM and ECOSENSUS provide heuristics for process-orientated management enabling more meaningful and purposeful interaction between professional/ technical experts and other stakeholders, as an alternative to conventional project-orientated management intervention. An alternative framing may help to steer practice away from the apoliticised comforting linearity of professionalised systematic project management towards more constructive systemic endeavours involving multiple stakeholders

A Faster Tableau for CTL*

There have been several recent suggestions for tableau systems for deciding satisfiability in the practically important branching time temporal logic known as CTL*. In this paper we present a streamlined and more traditional tableau approach built upon the author's earlier theoretical work. Soundness and completeness results are proved. A prototype implementation demonstrates the significantly improved performance of the new approach on a range of test formulas. We also see that it compares favourably to state of the art, game and automata based decision procedures.Comment: In Proceedings GandALF 2013, arXiv:1307.416

Sustainable Gastronomy: the Environmental Impacts of How We Cook Now and How the “Sustainable Diets” Agenda Might Shape How We Cook in the Future?

The 2019 Eat-Lancet report has proposed a global healthy sustainable diet, which would provide not only for human health but also sustain a healthy planet. The main recommendations are to increase consumption of healthy foods (such as vegetables, fruits, whole grains, legumes, and nuts), and a decrease in consumption of unhealthy foods (such as red meat, sugar, and refined grains). A critique of the EAT-Lancet diet is that it lacks consideration of local and traditional diets, food ways or systems of production, and the report has limited suggestions for how a global healthy sustainable diet could be implemented (Edman et al., 2019; Jonas, 2019; Torjesen, 2019). This paper firstly explores the sustainability impacts of cooking food, and how different foods have different environmental impacts from production, consumption, and cooking. It reports on a 2019 survey of cooking methods and habits in the UK, Australia and USA, examining how these different nations’ unique culinary and cooking habits lead to different environmental impacts. This paper then examines what dietary shifts are being recommended by current academic literature, and how these dietary shifts may change the methods of cooking in the future

Environmental ethics

Reynolds highlights three dimensions of environmental ethics – normative, philosophical and political – in the context of a long-standing controversial development initiative for dam constructions in the Narmada river valley in India. In discussing these three dimensions, he promotes the importance of environmental ethics in fostering responsible development intervention. A version of this reading can be found in Environment, Development and Sustainability in the 21st Century: Perspectives and cases from around the world, edited by Gordon Wilson, Pam Furniss and Richard Kimbowa (2009), published by the Open University and Oxford University Press, for which the reading was originally commissioned

Evaluation based on critical systems heuristics

Introduction: Critical systems heuristics (CSH) draws on the substantive work and philosophy of C. West Churchman, a systems engineer who, along with Russell Ackoff during the 1950s and 1960s, defined operations research in the United States. Churchman later pioneered developments in the 1970s of what is now known as 'soft' and 'critical' systemic thinking and practice in the domain of social or human activity systems. Churchman died in 2004. His legacy lies in signalling the importance of being alert to value-laden boundary judgements when making evaluations. Boundaries are what we socially construct in designing and evaluating any human activity system of interest (e.g., any situation of concern from a kinship group, an organisation, or a larger entity such as a national health system). The primary boundary of any human activity systems is defined by 'purpose'. Churchman's work is characterised by a continual ethical commitment to the overarching purpose of improved human well-being. In order to fulfil such purposeful activity, there is always a need to broaden inquiry from the particular system of focus so as to appreciate what Churchman calls the total relevant system. The effectiveness and efficiency of a system of interest depends on the actual boundary judgements associated with that system of interest. Churchman first identified 9 conditions or categories (including the category 'purpose�) associated with any purposeful system of interest in his book The Design of Inquiring Systems [1, 2]. He later extended these to 12 categories in a book provocatively entitled The Systems Approach and Its Enemies, significantly taking into account 3 extra factors (�enemies�) that lie outside the actual system of interest but which can be affected by, and therein have an effect on, the performance of the system [1, 2]. In the early 1980s a doctorate student of Churchman from Switzerland, Werner Ulrich, translated Churchman's 12 categories into an operational set of 12 questions which he called critical systems heuristics [3]. Ulrich returned to Switzerland and worked with CSH as a public health and social welfare policy analyst and program evaluator [4]. Section 2 introduces the basic toolbox of CSH, along with suggestions on when to use it and the benefits of its use. Section 3 will guide you through a suggested operational use of CSH questions in a process of evaluation. Section 4 provides a summary of an extensive case study in which CSH was used for evaluating the role of public participation in natural resource-use planning. Section 5 provides some advice for the practitioner in developing skills on using CSH for evaluation

Eutrophication and the management of planktonic algae: What Vollenweider couldn't tell us

The ”Vollenweider model” is a sophisticated mathematical statement about the long-range behaviour of (mainly temperate) lakes and their ability to support phytoplankton chlorophyll. Misapplication of the model, against which Vollenweider himself warned, has led to many misconceptions about the dynamics of plankton in lakes and reservoirs and about how best to manage systems subject to eutrophication. This contribution intends to frame the most important issues in context of the phosphorus- loading and phosphorus-limitation concepts. Emphasis is placed on the need to distinguish rate-limitation from capacity-limitation, to understand which is more manageable and why, to discern the mechanisms of internal recycling and their importance, and to appreciate the respective roles of physical and biotic components in local control of algal dynamics. Some general approaches to the management of water quality in lakes and reservoirs to eutrophication are outlined