Notes from 49th International STC Conference
Nashville, Tennessee, May 5-8, 2002

Sweetening "Cruel Pies" with a Dose of Humanity:
Adding the Human Element to Technical Illustrations that Depict Grim Statistics

Sam Dragga, Texas Tech University
and
Dan Voss, Lockheed Martin Missiles and Fire Control – Orlando

Sam Dragga is chairman of the English Department at Texas Tech University, where he oversees and teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in technical communication. He also serves as series editor of the Allyn & Bacon Series in Technical Communication. He is co-author of Editing: The Design of Rhetoric (Baywood) and Reporting Technical Information (10th ed, Oxford) and has published a variety of journal articles on ethics and intercultural communication. He is a Senior STC member affiliated with the Texas Tech student chapter.

Dan Voss is a manager within the Communications Department at Lockheed Martin Missiles and Fire Control-Orlando (LMMFC-O), with 24 years' experience with the world's largest defense contractor. He was named LMMFC-O Author-of-the-Year in 1998 (the only non-engineer ever to receive that award) after co-authoring the college text, Ethics in Technical Communication: Shades of Gray (Wiley) and has presented at the last 13 STC international conferences. He is an STC Fellow, manages the Society's Special Needs SIG, and is a member of the Orlando Chapter, where he manages the Education Committee.

Session Description: This session, based on the cover article in the August 2001 edition of Technical Communication which sparked a firestorm of commentary in the journal, addressed "cruel pies" – technical illustrations that pass the accuracy test but dehumanize the people behind the statistic by making them invisible. The session began with an overview where the presenters provided examples of "cruel pies" and then suggested graphic and textual techniques that could be used to introduce the human element without compromising the technical accuracy of the illustrations. The presentation sparked a spirited exchange during a question-and-answer session. Following that was a hands-on exercise where teams of technical communicators developed and shared creative solutions to humanize several challenging technical illustrations. Despite the controversy, or perhaps because of it, the session was evaluated 4.81 on a scale of 1 to 5, placing it in the top 10% of technical sessions at the conference.

Links to Presentation and Workshop Materials

Note: Since Sam and I were conducting this presentation and workshop, I obviously couldn't take notes. However, based both on our own observations and upon feedback from the conference evaluation forms, most participants felt both the presentation and the exercise were both unique and valuable. Links to the presentation, the workshop description, and the workshop instruction are provided below.

• "Sweetening 'Cruel Pies' with a Dose of Humanity: Adding the Human Element to Technical Illustrations that Depict Grim Statistics".
  Presentation by Sam Dragga and Dan Voss. The presentation consists of three elements: (1) an overview of the ethics of technical illustration, showing how most treatments to date have focused on accuracy while ignoring the human element; (2) examples of "cruel pies" (technical illustrations depicting grim statistics while leaving the victims invisible); (3) techniques for and examples of introducing the human element into such illustrations, "sweetening the cruel pies."
• "Sweetening 'Cruel Pies' with a Dose of Humanity: Adding the Human Element to Technical Illustrations that Depict Grim Statistics".
  Workshop Description. This is a one-page summary and overview of the presentation and workshop.
• "Sweetening 'Cruel Pies' with a Dose of Humanity: Adding the Human Element to Technical Illustrations that Depict Grim Statistics."
  Workshop Instructions. This is a brief outline of the workshop procedures governing small group work in developing creative solutions to humanize technical illustrations that portray grim statistics.