Notes from 56th International STC Conference
Atlanta, Georgia, May 2-5, 2009

Humanizing Technical Communication Visually:
How Human Forms Add Value to Pictures

Charlie Kostelnick, Iowa State University

Session Description: Visualizing human forms in technical communications makes information understandable and accessible by providing scale and emphasis, explaining how to do things, creating emotional appeals, and signaling gender and cultural context. Using contemporary and historical examples, this session explored conventions and cost-effective techniques for deploying human forms.

• Use of human form (or part, such as a hand) helps provide scale of objects.
• A hand can be pointing to a key step in a process or part of a machine (in lieu of a less personal arrow).
• Hands and fingers can be depicted actually performing tasks such as assembly, explaining how to do things.
• Through history, clothing in technical illustrations typically identifies the country and the period.
• An attempt is being made today to use universal icons (e.g., standing male figure, standing female figure), but even these will change with time, and they also differ across cultures.
• Use of gestures requires great care to avoid unwanted negative associations in other cultures.
• Options for showing humans include photos, detailed drawings, stick figures, or iconic representations.
• Human forms can create an emotional appeal to establish tone (such as happiness with the successful use of a product or distress to emphasize an important safety precaution).
• The evolution of gender roles over the centuries, as well as the variations from culture to culture, is evident from the use of gender in human forms in technical illustrations.
• Gender neutrality is often a goal today ... this can take some real graphic skill to be subtle. In pictograms where each figure represents 1,000 people, you could alternate male and female icons; in a diagram about assembly a lawn mower, the temptation would be to use a male figure; similarly, for a kitchen appliance, perhaps a female figure ... but there is real danger of stereotyping here as people are increasingly crossing traditional gender roles.
• Some applications for humanizing technical graphics
   
• Instructions
• Technical illustrations
• Data displays
• Human forms play a role in humanizing technical communication visually.
• Human forms are studied extensively in fine arts, but hardly at all in applied forms.
• Past practices can give us insights into current ones.
• Deploying human forms can be (or seem to be) daunting