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Michael R. GibsonProf. Michael R. Gibson

Professor, Communication Design; Graduate Program Coordinator, Interaction Design
University of North Texas, Department of Design; Denton, Texas

As a tenured Full Professor in UNT’s College of Visual Arts and Design’s Department of Design, Michael Gibson combines over 39 years of professional visual communication, product, and user experience and interaction design knowledge with over 30 years of academic experience as a design educator and researcher to his position at UNT. Professor Gibson is in his 27th year in UNT’s Department of Design, where he oversees the planning and facilitation of learning for M.A. candidates in Interaction Design and M.F.A. candidates in Design Research, including supervising sponsored projects, capstone experiences, and thesis and practicum projects. These types of projects are facilitated on behalf of north Texas-based small- and mid-sized businesses, not-for-profit, non-governmental organizations, north-Texas-based community groups and community service facilitators, and educational institutions and their support groups.

Professor Gibson has spearheaded and co-led efforts across the UNT landscape and into the north Texas region to integrate design-led research approaches in the areas of children’s physical and mental healthcare and K–12 education since 1999. He and his interdisciplinary teams of graduate and undergraduate UNT design students have worked with north Texas-based public-school personnel, medical professionals, and UNT faculty from a variety of academic areas
to positively alter situations or sets of circumstances to help:

  • teens all over Texas stop using tobacco products
  • K-12 students and their families in Denton County gain better access to mental health resources
  • middle and high school students in north Texas learn to engage in design thinking
    to solve problems
  • diabetic patients in rural Texas more effectively manage the daily demands
    of their disease

Keith OwensProf. Keith M. Owens

Professor, Communication Design; Undergraduate Program Coordinator,
User Experience Design
University of North Texas, Department of Design; Denton, Texas

Keith Owens has taught university-level design practice, thinking, and research for over 27 years. Between academic appointments, Owens worked as a designer, creative director, and studio principal in Houston, San Francisco, and Dallas. Client focal areas included corporate branding, simulation technology, hardware-based telephony, gaming development, textbook design, and real estate marketing.

For the last 23 years, Professor Owens has taught Communication and UXI Design and Applied Design Research at the University of North Texas (UNT) College of Visual Arts and Design (CVAD). He is also the past UNT | CVAD Design Research Center (DRC) director. The DRC was an urban laboratory where interdisciplinary teams of faculty and graduate students fused design thinking with evidence-based, human-focused research practice to tackle complex, real-world problems. With department colleague Michael Gibson, Professor Owens continues to co-develop undergraduate and graduate courses, curricula, and programs, all anchored by the central tenets of Design Thinking theory and practice. His current design research interest centers on the nature of design thinking as a discrete phenomenon and its thoughtful application in industry and educational settings. This research's central question is whether business strategies and learning approaches grounded in heuristic reasoning, iterative form-making, active empathy, collaboration, and critical questioning effectively foster innovative, resilient, and responsive outcomes in rapidly changing professional and educational settings.

Xin WangDr. Xin Wang

Principal Lecturer, Information Science; Program Director, Bachelor of Science
in Information Science Program
University of North Texas, Department of Information Science

Dr. Wang’s research expertise lies in areas such as User Experience Metrics, Information Architecture, and Health Informatics. She previously worked at a usability lab known as the Information Experience Laboratory at the University of Missouri for around six years as a senior user experience researcher. During those years, she led a team to provide user experience research and usability evaluation services for many high-profile organizational clients. Dr. Wang is an accomplished author with publications in core journals in the field of Information Science, such as the Journal of American Society for Information Science and Technology (JASIST), Scientific Reports, The Electronic Library, and the International Journal of Multimedia Data Engineering and Management. Dr. Wang has also disseminated her research results in numerous prestigious international conferences. Dr. Wang has received several research grants for her research. Dr. Wang has also served her discipline in various roles, such as the Juror for the Watson Davis Award and the Juror for the ProQuest Dissertation Award for the Association for Information Science &Technology (ASIS&T). She also continues to serve as a manuscript reviewer for multiple journals, such as the Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology (JASIST), The Electronic Library, the Journal of Information and Knowledge Management, and the Journal of Information Discovery & Delivery.