WHY WE GATHER

Our Mission

As technology permeates our lives, its impact is much deeper than productivity. It affects all of us: body, emotion, cognition and behavior — even community and society. Technology’s effects are not only positive: it can bring more stress than delight, more loneliness than community, and more idleness than movement. Through research, teaching, outreach and practice, nexUX will create understanding of these effects, and apply that understanding so that technology will do what it was designed to do: improve our lives.

Our Values

NexUX is still developing, but we are inspired by three principles. We will:

• Focus on people and improving their lives, individually and collectively.
• Create and embed ourselves in community, including local industry and government. To make a difference, we must be connected.
• Work with intellectual breadth. Our efforts will always involve deep rigor, but real solutions require synthesis.

Our story

NexUX was the inspiration of Benjamin Watson, Patrick Fitzgerald and Amber Howard, who saw the need for a community considering technology’s broader human impacts from an interdisciplinary perspective.  With the support of colleagues in industry and faculty from many different colleges, they were given bootstrapping funding by NC State’s RISF program.

With several industry and faculty experts, they organized a formative event, nexUX Camp, at which the community began coalescing.