6^th British HCI Group "HCI Educators’ Workshop"

The A B C (Appropriateness, Benefits and Costs) of D-E-F- (Distributed, Electronic and Face-to-Face) Learning in HCI.

The HCI Domain (maybe Current Issues in Teaching, Learning and Training for HCI)

Russell Beale

Position statement

HCI faces a new set of challenges. In the expanding world of interaction, in which it seems practically everyone now uses high technology in some form or another, be it mobile phones, tablet PCs, haldhelds, notebooks, the web, playstations or the like, HCI is in danger of falling off the bleeding edge. It is okay at analysing, not bad at measuring, and has some basic theorising, but it fundamentally fails to convince people that it is useful in designing, or that it is useful at all. Many people, academics and public alike, view much of HCI as common sense, with the little bits that are more complex as only marginally relevant, and then usually only later in the lifecycle. Students particularly see little merit in studying HCI - it's all too obvious for them. It's not that they like the logic and databases and compilers so much, more that they fail to see the relevance of what we teach them. And when you look at many of the HCI syllabi, it’s understandable - the issues that we often address, the world has moved on from. GUI's are common, feedback and response times are obvious if you consider gaming, they use mobiles so understand the issues of screen size - they are uninspired by most of what we offer.

HCI needs to become more constructive, more able to usefully contribute to the initial development of products and systems in a rigorous way. It has to be able to talk meaningfully and insightfully about new interaction devices, giving more than simple common sense can offer. It has to become more than evaluative. It has to offer theories that shed light on how new systems should work, how they will actually be used, and how they will be integrated into and affect society. It has to be able to comment on the new generations of users who are used to error recovery, wimp interfaces, resource-limited devices and ubiquitous internet access. These are users who have access to machines so fast that inefficient code is hardly an issue but who simultaneously communicate in only 170 character chunks with each other because of network restrictions. It has to be able to develop meaningful theories that can explain, be tested, proved and used, yet still cope with the complexities of human cognition and the rapidly expanding abilities of machine intelligence.

HCI has to convince colleagues, students, and the world in general that it has something positive to contribute. It does - there is some great stuff out there. But we have a bit of catching up to do.