CVAD Faculty Share Expertise in Design Education and User Experience in Sweden

UNT Professors Present at International Human-Computer Interaction Conference

Michael Gibson is facing forward and smiling. He has light brown hair and wears a navy blue jacket.

Michael R. Gibson

Gothenburg, Sweden — Communication Design Professors Michael Gibson and Keith Owens of the UNT College of Visual Arts and Design participated in the Human-Computer Interaction International Conference 2025, held from June 24 to 27, 2025. Both serve on the International Board of the “Design, User Experience, and Usability” Sub-Conference and chair panels that address pressing issues in design education and experience design.

HCII 2025 convened under the auspices of 21 international boards, offering both in-person and online participation.

Keith is facing forward and smiling. He is bald, wears black glasses and has a white beard.

Keith Owens

Gibson chaired a panel titled “In the Face of Rapidly Advancing Artificial Intelligences, What Learning Experiences in the Design Education Space Most Need to Evolve, and Why?” The session featured presentations by CVAD M.F.A. 2013 alum Dennis Cheatham, Miami University; Jena Marble, University of Illinois; Yvette Shen, The Ohio State University; Gibson and Owens. The panel considered how user experience designers can contribute as “second responders” in community recovery efforts following natural disasters. The discussion carried particular poignancy, occurring just one week before severe floods claimed more than 120 lives in Kerrville, Texas.

Gibson and Owens also made a poster presentation titled "Educating Designers to Get It at Least Partially Right When It Goes Really Wrong: Preparing Emerging User Experience Designers to Design for Worst-Case Scenarios of Use."

Cassine Nazir is facing forward and smiling. He is bald, wears glasses and a striped shirt.

Cassini Nazir

Owens chaired a panel titled “Experience Design for Spaces and Shared Interactions,” which included presentations by Cassini Nazir, CVAD assistant professor; Kuo-Wei Lee, Georgia Tech; international collaborators from Germany, North Macedonia, and China; and graduate students from the Umeå Institute of Design in Sweden.

Conference papers presented by UNT faculty and their collaborators have been published in the official proceedings by Springer, including Gibson and Owens’ co-authored study on AI in design education and Owens’ solo paper, “Generative AI in Professional Design Practice: Enabling or Replacing (Human) Creatives.” Additional contributions include Nazir, Lee, and Toyota researcher Mike Courtney’s “Becoming More Curious About the Future: ReadySetFuture_.”

More information about the conference sessions is available on the HCII website, and the published proceedings can be accessed through SpringerLink.