HCI2003: Big Questions for the Future of HCI yields Little Outcome

The HCI2003 panel on "Identifying the grand research challenges for HCI and how the community can best meet them" was led by Peter Johnson of the University of Bath. He was accompanied by Tom Rodden of the University of Nottingham, and by Guy Boy of Eurisko and Phillippe Palanque of UPS, both based in France. Sivasegaram Manimaaran, programme manager at the EPSRC, joined them at the front.

Johnson immediately drew attention to the preponderance of men with silvering hair on the panel. It had not escaped the audience either, where some of Britain's most senior women in CHI sat ready to chip in. This was not entirely of their own initiative, since the chair had asked at least one to come along, perhaps belatedly realising the shortfall on his panel.

The four panellists each made a presentation. Johnson began by calling for dialogue and collaboration between research communities, a strengthened basis for HCI research and the means to enable funding bodies to recognise the need for specialist HCI research that would allow HCI to contribute to the real world.

Boy, who has spent many years looking at cockpit safety, suggested that HCI is about automation, but human-centred automation. 'HCI is computer science,' he said.

'The important part is to better understand what computers are for and how they should be designed for people,' he continued, saying it was no surprise that anthropologists were entering the field.

Palanque drew attention to the number of specialised sub-fields developing: mobile HCI, CSCW, UIST, etc. He said that iterative design is good practice but not science and asked whether we could not perform a systematic exploration of interaction so that we might more often get it 'right from the beginning'.

Rodden, respected for his record of securing funding, drew attention to an unfortunate paradox. 'The work of HCI becomes invisible, the better we are at making things mundane,' he said. 'Consequently, we have to think very carefully about how we communicate what we do to people, to funding bodies and so on.' He said that another challenge was to muster large teams working to a common purpose.

Then the session was opened to the rest of the hall. The call announced that 'This panel session provides a European and international perspective and leads discussion to identify the main research challenges. The focus is on the development of a longer-term view of HCI research.' But just as 'European and international' was represented by two Frenchmen – who could not speak for all the non-English regions of the world, despite their own considerable competence and insight – so other aspects of the workshop suffered through grandiose ambitions.

The valuable points made during the discussion included the following:
• We need a way to join theory to practice, as they do not join up well at present.
• The disciplines we draw on are unable to help us.
• We don't have the vocabulary to describe what has gone into the process.
• We are not all doing it: we are providing ways of thinking and methods for industry to change the way that developers think.
• It's not enough just to push out methods.
• Scientific knowledge is repeatable and we want repeatable ways in HCI, but what values do we want to repeat?
• Case studies are not supported by funding bodies, unlike business case studies.
• Methods are a toolbox, not either/or.
• The field is expanding faster than the research community can respond, as we become victims of our own success.
• We are more or less engineers, facing the dilemma of making things that work vs finding out stuff of lasting value.
• Each study will have its own methods designed for it.

However, a common theme to many people's contributions was persistently lost, partly through a tendency for people to add their thoughts regardless of the flow of the discussion, and partly through a tendency for the chair to debate rather than collect and steer contributions. Combative points were allowed to stand and create tensions, while some productive observations and suggestions were left to flounder.

In sum, many people suggested that what unites the HCI research community is a series of values and beliefs, rather than theory or methodology. This was a powerful and emotional response to the questions being asked. It was mentioned repeatedly and always dismissed.

But beliefs and motivations are an important feature of work in an applied field, even if they do not fit comfortably with the goals of the workshop organiser and do not speak directly to funding concerns. What might have been a useful agenda-setting forum, acknowledging the disparate interests of a group united by vision rather than approach, was reduced to a listing of frustrations and some frustrated attendees.

Surely the challenge is to find a way of harnessing the energy of shared values and spreading the zeal where it could do the community most good? If one challenge is to communicate better, surely everyone should be grateful for such a powerful message to be able to spread. It's a pity that such a message was not established as a coherent, unifying outcome of the panel.

Good to see a session that brought together so many serious thinkers in the area then; but sad that an event with so much promise was squandered through lack of discipline. This is not the way to be taken more seriously as a research community.

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