researchers should ask themselves whether CHI is or wants to be a scientific conference. If not, then the reasonable question is: Where is the scientific conference on human-computer interaction? If, on the other hand, we want to claim that CHI is a scientific conference, we ought to consider why it lacks mainstream themes.

My argument here is that the reason our discipline lacks mainstream themes, overarching or competing theories, and accumulated knowledge is the culprit known as implications for design. This is the mantra of our discipline that requires our papers to justify what implications for design our results have. While previous researchers have argued the perils of this approach, our work is the first to provide systematic and justified grounds against it.

I argue that our eternal focus on implications for design is behind our discipline’s lack of motor themes.

Here is why:
• Implications for design put
practitioners’ needs above those
of researchers. Somehow our
discipline believes that our research
output should be more relevant to
practitioners rather than to fellow
researchers. Many will argue that
CHI and human-computer interaction
make up a multidisciplinary field
with practitioners, and therefore
implications for design are a way
to tie the field together. However,
one only has to look at the medical
field for a strong counterargument.

The medical field brings together scientists and practitioners, and in fact began as a “practice,” but it maintains strong scientific approaches involving repeatability and reusability of findings that substantially develop research themes.

• Implications for design give preference to contextual knowledge.

The reason is that design is, indeed, practical and contextual, and therefore requires contextual advice.

However, this means that more
and more of our research provides
only contextual knowledge, which
is simply useless under slightly
different situations. As a result, our
field completely lacks accumulated
knowledge that could potentially
evolve into motor themes.

• Implications for design are usually just a well-crafted argument. If we scrutinize most HCI papers that offer “Implications for Design” sections (including my own!), we will find that these are extremely polished pieces of text that do a wonderful job of not providing any reusable data, theory, or tools, yet manage to convince us that the implications are important. A further downside is that the use of English language is getting out of hand in our discipline. Unlike other disciplines that objectively and clearly describe their findings in scientific terms, our discipline has simply gone overboard and turned research into a prose competition. Doctoral candidates wonder: If I design the experiment, obtain the results, and report the results, why is that not enough? Why should I dress up my paper with eloquent language?

• Implications for design demotivate incremental research. Because implications for design are typically an elaborate piece of English prose, it is in fact very difficult to reliably demonstrate that my research has improved on previous implications for design. If previous research gave me a tool or data, it would be much clearer how to improve those, but how do I slightly improve a long argument?

• Implications for design demotivate repeating studies. If my research helps you design (because I offer you implications for design but no tool, theory, or data), then my research does not help you with your research. Given the billions spent on HCI research globally, how much of that research can be reused today? Frankly, very little, but there are a ton of implications for design.

As a way forward, I wish to urge our community to consider ways to establish motor themes. We simply need to get behind a small number of themes and develop them sufficiently. We need to stop conducting completely unrelated studies year after year and figure out ways to accumulate and develop knowledge. One way to do this is to change our mantra to “implications for research.” For instance, we could expect papers to explicitly argue

DOI: 10.1145/2729103 COP YRIGH T HELD BY AUTHOR. PUBLICATION RIGHTS LICENSED TO ACM. $15.00
whether their findings are repeatable,
how their findings can be reused by
other researchers in an experiment
or study, and how their findings can
be objectively improved. In addition,
we could expect that papers explicitly
provide tools (software), datasets, or
testable theories.
Finally, I wish to point out that I
am very optimistic about the future
of our discipline. Our work has been
very well received by the community
(getting an honorable mention for
the paper and one of the best-talk
awards for its presentation), a number
of researchers have provided us with
positive and encouraging feedback,
and a number of new initiatives have
sprung up our field to make it more
scientific in the sense of repeating
studies, incremental research, and
reusable findings.

Endnotes

1. Liu, Y., Goncalves, J., Ferreira, D., Xiao, B., et al. CHI 1994–2013: Mapping two decades of intellectual progress through co-word analysis. Proc. CHI 2014. ACM, New York, 2014, 3553–3562.

2. Bartneck, C. and Hu, J. Scientometric analysis of the chi proceedings. Proc. CHI 2009. ACM, New York, 2009, 699–708.

3. Callon, M., Courtial, J.-P., Turner, W. A., and Bauin, S. From translations to problematic net works: An introduction to co-word analysis. Social Science Information 22, 2 (1983), 191–235.

4. Callon, M., Courtial, J.-P., and Laville, F. Co-word analysis as a tool for describing the network of interactions bet ween basic and technological research: The case of polymer chemistry. Scientometrics 22, 1 (1991), 155–205.

5. Le Marc, M., Courtial, J.-P., Senkovska, E. D., Petard, J.-P., and Py, Y. The dynamics of research in the psychology of work from 1973 to 1987: From the study of companies to the study of professions. Scientometrics 21, 1 (1991), 69–86.

6. Coulter, N., Monarch, I., and Konda, S. Software engineering as seen through its research literature: A study in co-word analysis. Journal of the American Society for Information Science 49, 13 (1998), 1206–1223.

7. An, X. Y. and Wu, Q.Q. Co-word analysis of the trends in stem cells field based on subject heading weighting. Scientometrics 88, 1 (2011), 133–144.

 

Vassilis Kostakos is a professor of computer engineering in ubiquitous computing at the University of Oulu, where he directs the Community Imaging Group. → [e-mail]