Could the 1986 Challenger Space Shuttle disaster have been avoided if NASA engineers had interpreted their e-mails about faulty O-rings differently? Could writing more effective HIV/AIDS brochures measurably reduce the incidence of AIDS and HIV in a community? Can a cultural focus in technical writing improve the bottom line for businesses?

Katherine Wills, assistant professor in English at Indiana University-Purdue University Columbus, examines these questions and more in her co-edited Critical Power Tools: Technical Communications and Cultural Studies (with co-editors Blake Scott and Bernadette Longo; State University of New York Press, 2006). The collection is an unusual intersection of cultural studies applied to technical writing topics, demonstrating the complex relationships between new ideas and old cultural assumptions, between people and technologies, and between technological innovation and ethical decision-making.

Take the case of breakfast cereal in China, for example. In her essay, Wills' looks at how Kellogg's® marketed its crispy ready-to-eat breakfast cereal Coco Pops® in the Chinese marketplace. Technical writers and designers had to take Chinese cultural traditions and Confucian values into consideration. Packaging designers emphasized red coloring on the cereal boxes—a color that signifies good luck in Chinese culture. The designers also used a monkey, culturally revered in China, as a motif on the packaging.

In other words, say Wills and her co-editors, technical communications are embedded in cultural systems. But too often technical communication is taught and practiced as a “hyper-pragmatic” discipline that assumes technical writing is inherently transparent and effective across all cultures and emphasizes utilitarian efficiency over reflection, critique, even ethics. Looking at writing through a cultural studies lens illuminates the broader functions and effects of technical communications on its producers and its audiences.

Using cultural insights , Wills' co-edited volume rethinks technical communication, evaluating common terms such as “usability” as cultural constructs. “We and our students must ... ask critical questions for a sustainable democracy,” Wills and her co-editors write. “By furthering this ideal, we hope to help heal the rupture in public trust [caused] by technical communication mobilized more for profit and greed than public good (e.g. tobacco and pharmaceutical marketing, finance and accounting reports, and energy regulatory standards).”