Building upon insights from UX practice and design education, we identify what educators can do to foster world-class UX educational experiences. We study design pedagogy and the development of design expertise in a broad sense, as well as understanding how UX designers form and sustain their identity over time within our innovative undergraduate UX Design major.
Currently, our interests lie primarily in how UX students relate to designed educational experiences, learning to construct their own discipline- and tool-specific competence. We study these mechanisms and strategies primarily through critique and reflection artifacts, although we are also beginning to address students’ awareness of ethical and value-related concerns in relation to their developing competence.
Relevant Publications
Gray, C. M. (2018). Narrative Qualities of Design Argumentation. In B. Hokanson, G. Clinton, & K. Kaminiski (Eds.) Educational Technology and Narrative: Story and Instructional Design (pp. 51-64). Switzerland: Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69914-1_5
Vorvoreanu, M., Gray, C. M., Parsons, P., & Rasche, N. (2017). Advancing UX Education: A Model for Integrated Studio Pedagogy. In CHI’17: Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1441-1446). New York, NY: ACM Press. https://doi.org/10.1145/3025453.3025726
Gray, C. M., & Howard, C. D. (2015). “Why are they not responding to critique?”: A student-centered construction of the crit. In LearnxDesign: The 3rd International Conference for Design Education Researchers and PreK-16 Design Educators (pp. 1680-1700). Aalto, Finland: Aalto University. [pdf]
Gray, C. M. & Siegel, M. A. (2014). Sketching Design Thinking: Representations of Design in Education and Practice. Design and Technology Education, 19(1), 48-61. [pdf]
Gray, C. M. (2014). Living in Two Worlds: A Critical Ethnography of Academic and Proto-Professional Interactions in a Human-Computer Interaction Design Studio. (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). Indiana University, Bloomington, IN. http://hdl.handle.net/2022/18772