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In 2012 I published an essay about the comic strip remix “Garfield Minus Garfield,” in which the removal of the titular character had a profound impact on the space of the strip and the other inhabitants who remained intact. The revised strip appeared complete, but its spirit of connection and companionship had been ruptured by Garfield’s profound absence. Similarly, in each iteration of my education and work experience, I have tried to connect people to people, each time through a different medium, but something was always missing. Like someone trying to put together Ikea furniture without all the pieces, my quest to design meaningful interactions has been marked by a sense of incompleteness. User experience is my missing Garfield.

As an undergraduate, I wanted to understand how built space communicated a sense of place and purpose to its inhabitants. I found such a methodology in Architecture. I studied design, and learned how we create our identities when we engage with each other and the world around us. For my final senior project, I designed a cemetery, and I saw the potential of built space to reveal who we are as a society by how we remember those who are no longer with us. Ultimately, I wanted more than to design built spaces. I wanted to talk to the people I designed for and, through the space itself, connect with them over the long term. At the time, architecture as a discipline was unable to accommodate my goals, and so I went looking for the other side of these conversations. 

I found human-centered questions as a graduate student in English Studies. I researched rhetoric and digital media, and learned about the persuasive power of language. My dissertation, "Flickering Cities," explored the impact digital technologies are having on the shape of cities and the people who live in them. I experienced the growing pains of retooling myself for another medium as my focus shifted from designing and building spaces to researching and writing about them. But by the end, I came to see language as too finite a medium and research as too indirect a contribution by themselves to be effective tools for participating in our current multimedia landscape. I had found the questions but was dissatisfied by the disengaged position of the researcher, and so I sought a more hands-on approach.

I found practical applications of civic engagement as a teacher and administrator in higher education. I taught writing and led an English department, and learned the value of individual acts of citizenship and the persistence of will required to make meaningful change. My students desperately wanted to be connected to purpose and to each other, and to see meaning in their efforts. But like my own experiences, their available models of participation were like ladders with missing rungs—the students could see where the path led but not how to get from here to there. In the end, I knew I had seen all the pieces necessary to ignite connection between people, and I had been unable to unify them and bring them to bear.

I now see the union I have pursued in my past experiences with design, research, and teaching is at the heart of user experience where study meets practice and where physical meets digital. 

New practices of citizenship and education arise at the intersection of materials and media. I seek to participate in that conversation and become a contributing member of that community.

© 2021 Andy & Brea Engel

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