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Writer and Graphic Designer Collaboration: A Case Study of Process and Product
Author: Wendie Wulff
Degree: Ph.D. in Rhetoric, Carnegie Mellon University, 1990
The goal of this research was to conduct a broad,
exploratory study of writer and graphic designer
collaboration that would tell us: (1) how
interdisciplinary document design teams complete
lengthy, non-academic tasks requiring the integration of
visual and verbal content; (2) what characterizes the
process such teams use to create and integrate visual
and verbal content; and (3) what characterizes the
drafts of verbal texts, visual and verbal texts, and the
final products produced by the team. I used naturalistic
observation to study the activities of a nine-member,
interdisciplinary, document design team over the course
of seven months as they engaged in a large-scale writing
and graphic design task for a consumer electronics
client. A variety of converging data collection methods
were used including audio-taping meetings, observing
meetings, interviewing participants, collecting
participants' journals, and collecting draft and final
products of work. The process analysis involved coding
selections from the audio tapes for the collaborative
text production activities of planning, constructing,
and evaluating. The product analysis involved evaluating
the quality of the group's products from four key stages
in the process (the original manual sent by the client,
the first verbal draft, an intermediate visual and
verbal draft, and the final product) according to the
visual and verbal text features employed. Results
include an overview of the project history, a
preliminary description of the collaborative process
activities of the team, and a characterization of
product quality. Three key findings were: (1) the team
spent over 90% of their collaborative time planning and
evaluating visual and verbal texts; (2) the most common
sequence of collaborative process activities was
planning, evaluating, and re-planning--as opposed to
planning, constructing, evaluating, and re-constructing;
and (3) the visual and verbal integrated final products
were evaluated as most effective and attractive.
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