told us, “I am currently trying to teach courses that use these new technologies. There aren’t any existing textbooks that really support that easily, but that’s okay because there are a lot of interesting papers and exploration areas to draw on.”

Breadth and depth in HCI. Of course, interdisciplinarity brings its own set of tensions. Given a finite amount of available time, there are only so many topics that can be explored in depth. Yet our investigations reveal that both depth and breadth are demanded, or at least expected, from courses but that depth is associated with rigor, and breadth with a lack thereof. Commenting on breadth, one educator believes that “the top trend is to water it all down and out of the curriculum.” Another interviewee states it more strongly: “If you set a requirement and what happens is you get a person who is mediocre in a lot of things—that’s something I don’t want to happen.” Another remarks, “The challenge is students might come away with a broad set of skills that they are decent at instead of a few things that they are expert at...HCI education as the core discipline may not emphasize the depth part enough.” A professor summarizes the issues as follows, noting that this is not simply an issue for HCI, but rather a general observation about the Ph.D. process: “What a good Ph.D. student should know in terms of breadth—that’s the most problematic piece. Because one of the problems is that when you finish your Ph.D. you are the world’s smallest expert in this particular topic...it’s such a limited point of reference.” Students too are concerned that without depth they will not be considered domain experts, but without breadth the value of big-picture or systems thinking that is central to HCI is