Getto, Potts, Gossett & Salvo – Teaching UX: Designing Programs to Train the Next Generation of UX Experts

Getto, Potts, Gossett  & Salvo – Teaching UX: Designing Programs to Train the Next Generation of UX Experts. SIGDOC’13, pgs. 65-70.

  • Authors note that UX has, over the past 10 years, become a focus of a “variety of related practices” from TC (65).
  • Uses the “TC as problem-solving activity” rhetoric a la Johnson-Eilola to claim importance of UX in TC (ibid) b/c contemporary problems are “subjective, rarely solved permanently, and engaged by multiple actors.”
  • Authors note that most folks that receive UX education come out of HCI (focus on ICT), IT or psychology. Most UXers are, in reality, self-taught.
  • Bob Johnson’s User-Centered Technology is highlighted as a “watershed” moment in the shift from system design to designing for users.
  • KEY SOURCE TO ACQUIRE: Soul of a New Machine (2000) by Tracy Kidder – TC as strategy. Christina Wodke’s IA: Blueprints for the Web (2002). Johnson-Eilola & Selber (2013) and Simmons (2008) takes up users rather than user or system and emphasizes users relationship to artifacts.
  • Movement toward participatory design. So, in essence, design of tech: systemàuseràusersà
  • TC as a field that is about adaptation, learning, growing and embracing change is a nice way to think about a non-genre based approach to TC pedagogy (66-7).
  • Authors note that “learners understand that the form, content and context of the tools they use must match the exigencies of the job at hand” (67).
  • The authors go on in this piece to discuss UX at the undergraduate and graduate level as well as in private-public partnerships and corporate workshops/UX professional organizations.