Apparantely, there’s a Communications of the ACM group blog now, called blog@CACM. There is also a blog roll that includes the blog of Daniel Lemire, which happens to be one of my favorite research blogs. Although Daniel works in a different subdiscipline of computer science, I enjoy reading his research advice and interesting viewpoints on the process of doing research.
The group blog features an interesting post by Tessa Lau, titled Three Misconceptions About Human-Computer Interaction, which raises a few interesting points. In my opinion, HCI is much more fundamental to creating interactive systems than people usually believe. In this context, I would like to refer to an interview with Patrick Baudisch that I recently read, in which he explains how he got started in HCI:
Doantam: How did you get started working on human-computer interaction?
Patrick: Without knowing it. I was a Ph.D. student in Darmstadt, Germany and worked on user interfaces for information filtering systems. A friend of mine saw my work and said “oh, I did not know you were in HCI, too”.
That was the first time I heard of that field.
Daniel Lemire
April 2, 2009 — 19:03
I don't use the HCI methodology or publish in HCI venues, but I still do some HCI:
Collaborative OLAP with Tag Clouds: Web 2.0 OLAP Formalism and Experimental Evaluation
http://arxiv.org/abs/0710.2156
Tag-Cloud Drawing: Algorithms for Cloud Visualization
http://arxiv.org/abs/cs.DS/0703109
Anyhow, I don't believe in “having an area.” People have skills and interests. We can cluster people… but there are no hard-code classification.
If people stuck to their areas, Tim Berner-Lee would have been stuck in Physics. Instead, he branched out into knowledge management and invented the Web.
That is maybe the lesson in the Patrick Baudisch quote.
Jo Vermeulen
April 3, 2009 — 15:40
Indeed. Many HCI researchers also do research related to other fields (software engineering, machine learning, cognitive psychology, electronics, …), although they don't necessarily contribute in those areas. I agree that there is no hard classification.
I think cross-pollination between fields is very valuable, and should be something to strive for. The example of Tim Berners-Lee inventing the Web (together with Belgian computer scientist Robert Cailliau by the way) is indeed an interesting one. It is often stated that many of the greatest inventions or insights were based on a mix between different disciplines. Another example I find interesting is the one of Alan Kay who pushed object-oriented programming forward and developed Smalltalk based on his insights from biology (complex organisms consists of billions of communicating cells or 'objects' in OOP terms). He also explored the work of Jean Piaget on constructionist learning in developing Smalltalk (and currently Squeak and Croquet) as an educational tool.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts Daniel!
Holsters Guy
May 20, 2009 — 15:22
When i first read that i thought he said he didnt know he had a PHD, haha thanks for the read.
kongrit
July 22, 2009 — 06:00
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