User Experience Design (UXD) Competency Model: Identifying Well-Rounded Proficiency for User Experience Designers in the Digital Age
Atthaves Borriraklert, Supaporn Kiattisin · Archives of Design Research · 2021
Twentieth-century principles of designMost college-level design programs in the United States trace their curricular heritage and pedagogical practices to the Bauhaus and other modernist efforts to improve the function and appearance of messages, products, and environments.The typical location of design study in departments or colleges of art emphasized the visual qualities of objects, mastery of craft, and individual authorship as core values.And the trade-based history of design encouraged resistance to the development of theory and substantive study across disciplines for much of the twentieth century.The principles guiding design practice in the decades following World War II were those of an industrial economy.Design was improved through a linear, causal process of incremental change that identified root causes of friction and eliminated problems one at a time.Constraints defining the scope of design work were known, mostly limited to physical objects and their production, and perceived to be consistent in their influence over time.A primary role for design was to reduce the number of interacting variables in the problem context; to simplify complexity, not only in form, but also among competing priorities that required resolution.The stopping point of the design process was "almost perfect."The design of new editions or related objects repeated the development process for each variation.Strategically, design was at the cosmetic end of top-down decision-making and appearance differentiated companies in the marketplace.Communication strategists viewed people in broad demographic terms, targeting them as passive consumers of segmented marketing, not through substantive differences in the qualities of their experiences.Alistair Parvin describes design of this era as something done to and for people, not with or by people.The content of design education mirrored these principles and the production technologies of the time.Students' college introduction to design was typically through a series of abstract formal investigations, deferring discussions of audience and meaning until after mastering a limited visual vocabulary presumed to be universally appropriate to any message or context.Typographic competencies were built through carefully scaffolded assignments of ascending scale-from letter to word, paragraph to page, and finally to document.The study of typography was separated from the study of image, integrated only in later applications and rarely linked to investigations of language or changing demands on readers.College textbooks reinforced this simple-to-complex sequence of content, long after software asked designers for simultaneous decisions about typeface, point size, line spacing, margins, and column width and style before the designer could set a single letterform.