Connecting UX Academia & Industry

I am doing a new presentation of very old stuff for the UX@UM conference on Saturday, April 1. My talk’s title is “History of Connecting UX Academia and Industry“. I have called this “User Experience Research-Practice Interaction” (UXRPI) and “Industry-Academic Collaboration in UX” in the past.

UX@UM is a conference at the University of Michigan, by graduate students, for graduate students. This is the 2nd year of the event. I missed it last year. When the students in the college of Education dreamt it up in October of 2021, I advised them to include the School of Information, Stamps School of Art & Design and other groups interested in UX. They pulled together a nice coalition of students across traditional university silos/ivory towers, so I just had to support them with a talk this year once I heard the connecting academia with industry theme.

The talk will be a recap of my personal journey studying the industry-academy gap in the context of UX, listening to stories of what has worked (and not worked) for others, and trying to close some of those gaps myself.

Slides (as PDF)

Here is one slide, my timeline, with links to background material that you may find interesting.

2005: UXnet Development Consortium
2010: First “#UXRPI” tweet
- CHI conference workshop on “Researcher-Practitioner Interaction”
- IA Summit & IUE “napkin drawing” sessions
- Don Norman writes about The Research-Practice Gap
- World Usability Day Dayton keynote
2013: UXPA conference “idea market”
2014: AIGA Connecting Dots conference presentation
2015: Nottingham Symposium & Susan Dray Lifetime Practice Award
2016-17: Michigan State University research project
2018: Decipher conference
2020+: 24 Hours of UX, SIGCHI Partnerships, OhioX
2023: UX@UM!