A collaborative effort
will be particularly
helpful for HCI
educators and learners
in areas where HCI
is starting to be
recognized as an
emergent field of study
in response to growth
in interactive
technology design
and development.
March + April 2013
interactions
behalf; the opinions of industry
practitioners are divided. While
students articulated concerns about
making a choice early on between
industry or academia, some more
seasoned professionals, later in their
careers, reflected on the blurring
between the two arenas as positive,
with opportunities for collaborative
engagement on joint projects.
Notably, however, our table of
topics rated most and least highly
by our different constituencies
clearly shows a disjoint between
industry and academic professionals (see Table 3). While industry
professionals give high ratings to
topics such as change management,
e-commerce, product development, and product management,
and low ratings to topics such as
health informatics and ubiquitous
computing, academic professionals
rate ubiquitous computing highly
and change management low. We
are loath to derive too many hard-and-fast conclusions from this data,
but on the surface it appears that
these disjoints reflect the relative
amount of importance placed upon
near- and medium-term goals for
product launch and maintenance
versus longer-term goals in industry, and the more agenda-setting
and exploratory role afforded to
research in academic institutions.
Since its incept, HCI has been
focused on operationalizing general
principles derived from abstract
principles. This includes instantiating abstractions into products,
which includes producing frameworks and processes (including
change management and product
development) that are tactically
appropriate to enable strategic success. In addition to driving research
insights forward academically, HCI
is charged with providing better
development methods that draw on
and honor those insights.
Summing Up, Looking Forward
At the highest level, the results
of our research echo the observations of Hewett et al.’s 1992
report, in which the authors state:
“There is currently no agreed
upon definition of the range of
topics which form the area of
human-computer interaction” [ 6].
In some respects, this is surprising, given the passage of time and
the incredible advances we have
witnessed in technology development, plus the growing awareness
of the role of HCI, particularly in
consumer product development.
This awareness has encouraged
some companies to employ HCI
specialists, which in turn influences universities to develop HCI
programs and courses. In other
respects, it is not surprising that the
fundamental issues that emerged
from our research are similar to
those identified by Hewett et al.:
Our multidisciplinarity is an enduring strength but also a continual
challenge. We believe that there is
cause for great optimism—more and
more people in our discipline feel
empowered to participate in discussion of these tensions. In 1992, HCI
education was relatively new. Very
few people outside of SIGCHI and
other sister professional communities felt their voices could, or would,
be heard. At that time, most HCI
educators knew all the courses and
programs that were offered across
the world. Now, there are hundreds,
if not thousands, of HCI courses.
But does this signal success? It
depends on whom you ask. For
some, the answer is a resounding
“yes!” For others, there is concern
about disciplinary focus and differentiation, “quality control,” and
“brand.” Certainly, we need a deeper
understanding of the issues raised
here, and issues that are emerging as a result of developments