HCI and theology

Abstract

Introduction: I’m Doing What? Why on earth would I want to consider pursuing a research degree in human-computer interaction (HCI)? That is a good question that I still do not have a good answer to, but my choice seems to come out of my educational and life experience. I started fairly traditionally by getting a computing degree and then going out to work. For the last 20+ years, I have been working in the software development business, in a range of roles and organizations. In a number of these roles, a common theme emerged—that I was writing applications for people who were not always computer literate. It also became clear that many of the computer applications that I was involved in had negative effects on many people—it put them out of a job, it made their job different, or, often, they would be reduced to a computer operative, with many of their skills replaced by a computer. As the computer business changed and more applications moved toward PCs, the situation became worse. As computer applications became far more common, more people who did not understand computers were forced to use them—but the application design, in terms of how they interacted with people, did not change. In fact, I remember one occasion where I was being encouraged to design applications in a way that mirrored mainframe, menu-driven tools, rather than designing a more appropriate interactive interface. These applications made people who knew their jobs perfectly well feel stupid simply because they could not appreciate the computer applications that they were expected to use. And, to be honest, many of the applications were rubbish. Partly due to my frustration at this inattention to the needs of the user, I began studying again. I followed my interest in theology and eventually obtained a degree in that as well. Because I did this in my own time, there was a necessity to integrate what I was learning about with the world in which I was involved. To a significant degree, this meant that I needed to understand my work designing applications from a theological perspective; I needed to be able to see my work from the view of how it matched my growing theological understanding, especially relating to how God, the world, and people interacted. While this proved a challenge, it was also an interesting challenge that helped me both in my studies and in my work. Most significantly, I learned not to define myself by my work, because who I am is far more than just relating to the job. The job—the career even—is just one aspect of me and needs to appropriately integrate into the other aspects. My theological studies helped me see more about not only God, but also people.