ABSTRACT
This chapter encourages technical communicators to reconsider the ways in which they care for the needs of both humans and technologies in professional networks; using Latour's ANT and a pluralistic ontological approach to UX enables practitioners to more adeptly navigate complex networks and projects. Such a real inquiry is typically referred to by UX designers as contextual inquiry. Stemming from ethnography, contextual inquiry is typically conducted through interviews and observations of users in their own work environments. The chapter develops an understanding of the NCCA project as a network that links human action to nonhuman action and that sees the linkage as rhetorical. It wants to emphasize that a networked, Latourian approach to rhetoric is a very iterative, in-process approach. In order to develop this fundamentally rhetorical, posthuman awareness of networks, technical communicators must inquire into the contexts users come from. The chapter shows four main types of relationships represented: user scenarios, causal relationships, requires and adds functionality.
