Notes on Design and Science in the HCI Community

Abstract

The human-computer interaction (HCI) community is diverse. Academics and practitioners from science, engineering, and design contribute to its lively development, but communication and cooperation between the different groups is often challenging. Designers struggle to apply the results of scientific studies to their design problems. At times, open conflicts between the different groups emerge, in particular between scientists and designers, since they have the least common ground.1 The Computer Human Interaction (CHI) Conference of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), which is the largest and arguably one of the most important conferences in the field, is organized through the Special Interest Group Computer Human Interaction (SIGCHI). At the 2005 SIGCHI membership meeting, discussion of the CHI 2006 conference ignited a shouting match between academics and practitioners.2 This outbreak of emotion illustrates the tension between the different groups, and it can be explained by taking a closer look at their values, and at the barriers that separate them. Snow3 was the first to talk about such barriers, even though he focused on only two cultures: the scientific and the literary intellectuals. While his political ideas have become somewhat obsolete with the decline of the USSR, his vision for the benefits of cooperating experts still holds: The clashing point of two subjects, two disciplines, two cultures—of two galaxies, so far as that goes—ought to produce creative chances. In the history of mental activity that has been where some of the break-throughs came.4