Wicked modes in UX: Pedagogical considerations for data détournement

• Radical changes in the UX industry following the height of the COVID-19 pandemic have prompted a need to reaffirm commitments to multimodal, compositional approaches to UX pedagogy. • Surveillance, slow design, slow composition, and embodiment are central concerns for UX and composition curriculum development. • Data détournement fosters critical design practices in multimodal UX composition, improving awareness and resistance for deceptive design practices. • Resisting deceptive design can build and reaffirm existing commitments to embodied, emplaced, and justice-driven approaches to UX. User experience (UX) as both a vocation and a skillset is currently in the center of a wicked knot: emerging technologies such as generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) and large language models (LLMs) are (for the moment) widely accessible in unprecedented ways and are already heavily integrated into modern workplace practices and educational spaces. Further, workplace demands have led to a change in perception of the function and value of UX, and the field is facing new obstacles to hiring and research funding. Our article argues that a resituation of UX is needed: we—as instructors and administrators—need to focus on UX as an act of slow, embodied, and multimodal UX composition. To do this work, we offer the strategy of détournement as central to UX curriculum and preparing students for design work in a variety of rhetorical situations, expressed through our example assignments for instructors to implement within the college classroom.