Rethinking Writing, Design, and Technology: Editors’ Preview of Computers and Composition’s Special Issue on Multimodal UX Composition

In writing and rhetoric, user experience (UX) is no longer just a buzzword borrowed from tech companies or design firms. It’s reshaping how we understand writing itself and how we design for readers, listeners, and users whose experiences unfold across screens, voices, and virtual spaces. Our upcoming special issue of Computers and Composition, titled “Multimodal UX (MMUX) Composition,” takes this shift seriously. It brings together scholars who explore what happens when the boundaries between writing, design, and technology begin to blur and when composing becomes an act of building experiences rather than simply producing texts.

Over the past decade, the field of composition has been undergoing what we might call a UX turn, accompanied by a growing recognition that writing is not only rhetorical and multimodal, but also experiential. Scholars have examined how design thinking and user-centered design can transform writing instruction and help students see themselves not just as authors but as designers of meaning. In classrooms, this shift has meant teaching beyond grammar and argumentation to include project management, empathy mapping, wireframing, and usability testing, among many other tools that are prevalent in the UX industry. These methods help students understand how texts, images, and interfaces work together to guide a user’s journey through information.

In our research, we found that UX and composition intersect as researchers in composition have also influenced and worked in the fields of technical and professional communication and UX. As many scholars were originally trained in English departments or taught composition, they also took these rhetorical underpinnings when they moved to UX design or were introduced to it in their technical and professional communication programs. UX composition isn’t necessarily about turning English majors into app developers or UX designers (though many do end up thriving in those fields). It’s about something deeper: rethinking writing as a human-centered design process. It means asking how we can create experiences that are ethical, accessible, and inclusive or experiences that respond to users’ needs, contexts, and emotions. These experiences require recognizing how this is changing composition practices and opening up user-centered thinking to rhetorical composition practices with multiple technologies.

When we talk about MMUX composition, we’re talking about composing across words, images, sound, and interactivity, including the semiotic resources that make digital life what it is today. A MMUX approach asks writers and designers to think beyond the page: How do readers feel when they scroll, click, listen, or move through digital space? What sensory and emotional cues guide their engagement? Human–Computer Interaction researchers remind us that experience design depends on users’ locations, postures, emotions, and intentions (Stephanidis et al., 2019). Scholars in composition have extended that insight to what Jody Shipka (2011) calls a “composition made whole,” or a recognition that writing has always been embodied and material, just now in new ways. For instance, when students navigate between wireframes and interactive elements to design communication that is responsive, visual, and immersive, they are also needing to compose for where the user is and what they are doing in their material, embodied contexts. These practices demand fluency in multiple modes of expression and a sensitivity to how users interact with content across media.

The rise of generative AI (GenAI), augmented reality (AR), and virtual reality (VR) is rapidly transforming how we think about composing. Tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Figma AI plugins have made it possible for writers and designers to co-create text, images, and interfaces with machine collaborators. This is both thrilling and unsettling. On one hand, AI-assisted UX allows us to create personalized, adaptive, and interactive experiences faster than ever before. On the other hand, it raises serious questions about authorship, bias, surveillance, and digital ethics. As educators and researchers, we’re called to help students not just use these tools, but critically design with them. Such practice includes understanding their biases, interrogating their outputs, and ensuring that human-centered values guide technological innovation. That’s precisely what MMUX composition seeks to do: to not only ground UX practices through composition practices, but also use UX practices for ethical innovations and inclusive designs.

Today, MMUX composition sits at the crossroads of design thinking, AI ethics, accessibility studies, and critical digital literacies which the Digital Life Institute investigates in its various clusters. Our special issue invites new collaborations between compositionists and UX professionals, between teachers and technologists, and between scholars and designers. The articles in this issue take up that challenge. They explore how “writing-as-design” and “design-as-writing” are being reimagined through emerging technologies, how multimodal composition pedagogy fosters inclusivity and accessibility, and how ethical UX design practices can help us compose for justice in increasingly algorithmic worlds.

As we look ahead, we imagine a future where writing classrooms become experience labs, or spaces where students and scholars experiment with GenAI, AR, and VR not just as tools, but as media and composition environments for students to practice empathetic and justice-oriented design. In this future, composition is not simply about gaining technical skills but about teaching writers to design with care, creativity, and critical awareness. UX composition provides the vocabulary and methodology to do just that.

In essence, MMUX Composition leads us to:

• A widening focus on the increased merging of technologies with digital life and resulting shifts in multimodal composition practices influenced by UX;
• A greater focus on the dynamic between user-centered design and writing while also recognizing composition’s focus on rhetorical, exploratory practices as necessary for composers;
• A recognition that UX has always been a part of composition scholarship due to its focus on audience-centered thinking and multimodal, iterative composition practices;A focus on new technologies as introducing new, layered literacies which are embedded in specific composing environments, such as VR and first-person, embodied experiences; and
• A renewed focus on digital life as something we design, write, and compose with the resultant need to use critical perspectives to advance social justice goals while also advocating for humans in the composition classroom and beyond.

UX composition helps us see writing as part of a larger ecology of human–machine interaction, where interface, prompts, and images contribute to the user’s lived experience. MMUX composition asks: How can we compose experiences that are not only usable, but meaningful? Not only interactive, but inclusive? And not only innovative, but ethical? As digital life continues to evolve, these questions will define the next chapter of composition studies and we invite the next generation of writers, designers, and thinkers to shape our shared technological futures with empathetic design and ethical exploration.

References

Shipka, J. (2011). Toward a composition made whole. University of Pittsburgh Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt5hjqkk

Stephanidis, C., Salvendy, G., Antona, M., Chen, J. Y. C., Dong, J., Duffy, V. G., … Zhou, J. (2019). Seven HCI Grand Challenges. International Journal of Human–Computer Interaction, 35(14), 1229–1269. https://doi.org/10.1080/10447318.2019.1619259