The Invisible Work of Iterative Design in Addressing Design Injustices

Abstract

The move to describe technical and professional communication (TPC) as a problem-solving, design-based endeavor has allowed a broadening of the work rhetoric can and does do in the world, reframing TPC as an engaged practice that helps us solve complex problems. And yet as scholars invested in social justice, the authors find few connections between the design approaches often outlined by TPC scholars and the problems that emerge because of oppression, injustice, and the attendant rhetorical violences that pair with them. This article situates a methodological praxis of iterative design, examining design and design work as complicit in the creation and destruction of oppressive structures. This piece offers a brief overview of the use of design as a term for addressing injustice at multiple levels. Authors then describe the methodological potentials of iterative design and identify three inherent values of iterative processes (non-linearity, slowness, and multivocal critical imagination) that enhance the methodological praxis of iteration. The piece concludes with suggestions for how iterative design can take shape in our classrooms, institutions, and communities as a tool for change.