In weather risk communication, there is a disconnect between numerical models and community members’ experiences. To help resolve this issue, the authors propose a topological method to identify community risk thresholds, arguing that they offer a middle ground that enables more robust communication about risk. The authors surveyed 1,429 participants, including decision-makers and public audience members, who responded to probabilistic visualizations from five National Weather Service offices. The results reveal that audiences engage in sophisticated risk assessment by drawing on multiple dimensions that can be communicated as community risk thresholds. Embedding these thresholds in the forecast can better link numerical and experiential risk.

While methods associated with community-engaged research have traditionally included surveys, interviews, workshops, and stakeholder feedback, this article argues that the affordances of eye tracking make it a strong candidate for use in community research contexts. Because eye tracking is grounded in experiential metrics that describe—rather than prescribe—how participants engage with multimodal work, the method encourages genuine engagement with written and visual materials, inviting the experience of a broad range of participants. Using examples of eye tracking data collected as part of three previous community research initiatives, I argue that eye tracking can bolster community-engaged research by (a) reflecting a multiplicity of reader experiences, (b) revealing how design choices impact cognitive load, and (c) fostering reflection on strengthening community engagement. While eye tracking has often been used in educational and academic settings, community-engaged research projects offer an opportunity to expand the impact of the method, benefiting the work of researchers, writers, and designers as well as the communities they serve.

Communicating risk through public-facing formats like infographics is important in technical communication. Grounding our work in a collection of infographics about extreme heat risk, we argue that understanding attention and memory can help communicators make more effective design choices. This study combined eye tracking with memorability data to determine (a) what elements of infographics (text, visuals) drew attention and (b) what participants found memorable about heat risk communication. Results from our exploratory research found that student designer and community participants (1) spent less time reviewing the bottom quarter of infographics and (2) spent the majority of their time reading text but remembered visual and textual elements equally.

We conducted a two-phase study with five National Weather Service (NWS) forecast offices in the Western United States region to improve the visualization of probabilistic forecast information (PFI) for their communities. We advance the concept of community risk thresholds (CRT), based on rhetorical commonplaces (communal beliefs, norms, and values) as a productive focus for forecasting. Our results suggest that CRTs are a promising heuristic for simplifying the visual presentation of PFI and increasing its community utility. We discuss the synergies and challenges of action research projects in weather risk communication and conclude by projecting future work focused on (a) visualizing community risk thresholds and (b) identifying productive pairings between weather hazard type and graphic genre.

People working at the intersection of composition and user experience often serve as the connective material that binds content to use. In merging fundamental skills of both in multimodal UX, practitioners position themselves as essential mediators connecting technical information, storytelling, and technologies that carry impactful messages across disciplines, audiences, and contexts. Building on previous work that advocates for the power of narrative in AR/VR storytelling, we demonstrate how combining the composing strategy of narrative layering with user testing can guide the creation of inclusive, community-centered VR experiences. To illustrate the power of this capacity, we ground our analysis in the design of a Virtual Reality experience about advanced water purification, outlining a method for how narrative layering and UX testing can be woven together to address a variety of perspectives through interdisciplinary, layered storytelling. In doing so, we argue that multimodal UX is most powerful when it blends the needs of a range of audiences to build stories that communicate complex information in an inclusive and engaging way.

Social media, the pandemic, and environmental hazards have all played a role in shifting the landscape of risk communication. This paper takes a retroactive risk approach to study how COVID-19 messaging was shaped in the first 2 years of the pandemic. Using a corpus of 764 news releases from five health departments, I combine corpus analysis with coding based on government capacities to show that health departments highlighted public health data (surveillance) and risk guidance (governance), while downplaying enforcement (coercion). This process of revisiting communication from an acute risk phase can help us recalibrate how public health roles are constituted through language to prepare for future events.

The majority of what we compose, we compose for others. Because audience impact is central to the success of writing and designing, peer review tests how our compositions work in the world. Accordingly, we have built decades of scholarship establishing best practices for sharing our work with others, especially as new technologies emerge. This article argues for the introduction of eye tracking as a tool that can supplement peer review, offering an expansion of what counts as feedback that fosters greater access and agency for students throughout the writing process. The method for incorporating eye tracking to expand traditional peer review modalities moves students from passive research subjects to active users of eye-tracking data. In doing so, students can examine how audiences experience their work, helping to frame revisions of their multimodal compositions and consider what story they most want to tell.

As the impacts of extreme heat escalate, digital maps have been designed to triangulate the location, timing, and level of risk. To understand how these tools align with a range of heat communication needs, rhetorical topology is used to analyze three mapping tools that make projections at global, national, and local levels. While these tools seek to make heat risk visible, the reliance on numerical definitions and comparative statistics gets prioritized over lived experiences of heat, which could limit their impact. I argue that broadening the focus to include causal relationships and narratives may communicate extreme heat risk more equitably.

Our largest multidisciplinary problems outpace disciplinary training designed to reinforce boundaries. Using an interdisciplinary conversation about adolescent brain imaging, I argue that disciplinary stances (interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary) operate like rhetorical stases, helping diagnose where conversations build or diverge among experts. Because what constitutes interdisciplinarity is contested, mapping rhetorical features of each disciplinary stance stabilizes definitional debates by grounding interactions in specific discursive practices and offers technical communicators ways to facilitate and participate in stronger crossdisciplinary communication.

Communicating risk amid moments of scientific ambiguity requires balance: Overdelivering certainty levels can cause undue alarm whereas underdelivering them can lead to increased public risk. Despite this complexity, risk assessment is an important decision-making tool. This article analyzes the circulation of the term “risk” in a corpus (74,804 words) of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention communications regarding COVID-19 from January 1 to April 30, 2020. Tracking collocations of the 147 instances of risk in this corpus reveals that experts initially framed risk away from individuals, complicating people’s differentiation between public and personal impacts. Recommendations are offered for how institutions can reframe subjectivity to promote vigilance during pandemics.