CHI 2005: Randy Pausch sells Interdisciplinarity as the Key to the Big Issues

When Randy Pausch, professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, opened CHI 2005 this year, his engaging delivery style was compared by some to that of a TV evangelist. His presentation, "A Technologist's Comments on Psychologists, Artists, Designers, and other Creatures Strange to Me", was accompanied by expansive arm gestures. It was a lively beginning to the annual conference, this time in Portland, Oregon, USA.

Indeed it was a multimedia beginning, as everyone coming into the room was given a crayon – a chance to hold and smell and reconnect with memories of childhood play.

Pausch warned that the danger with traditional academic disciplines is that they may investigate things that can be measured really accurately, rather than the things that are really important to measure. Describing the work at the HCI Institute in CMU, he showed how the programmes bring together teams from different disciplines (arts, electronics, computing, design) who work together on a series of practical projects. Here the focus is very much on education for collaboration - how important it is to learn to work across disciplinary boundaries to reach creative solutions. He stressed the importance of putting people together as equal partners - the engineers are not there to implement the artists' visions; the artists are not there to prettify the engineers' constructions. They are partners to create new possibilities. He raised the importance of being childish and child-like - having a sense of play and possibility. Hence the crayons at the beginning.

He then worked through some examples of student collaborations from his 'petri dish' course in Building Virtual Environments. Groups of four students work for two weeks to design, implement and test a novel virtual environment. Examples shown were a version of 'Pole Position' where the car is controlled by an audience leaning from side to side; a kayaking virtual environment, controlled using a 3ft metal rod; and a virtual world of bunnies created in stages by conducting with data-gloves.

The course, he said, is about people bonding - 'there is a lot of hugging in this course' which can make it a bit uncomfortable.

Responding to questions, he discussed how he deals with the issue of students 'who aren't very good'.
* filter them out in recruitment: ask what can you _do_ - when Pausch went to Walt Disney Imagineering they asked him what he could do and he said 'Well I'm a professor of CS at Carnegie Mellon' and they said 'But that's not what I asked. Tell me, professor boy, what can you _do_?'
* filter for reliability by requiring each student to come to two different meetings - do the applicants actually turn up?
* But also, don't be afraid to occasionally fail a student.

Then he was asked how he generalised work to other areas - the big issues – 'How do you move from what's cool to what's really important?'

Pausch rejected the premise of the question: at present, in Africa, the Muppets have an HIV positive muppet. This can be really influential and powerful in relation to the big issues, he said. The average American watches 22 hours of TV per week, so if you want to influence people, there is your platform, he told them. The solutions to the big issues are likely to call for creative multi-disciplinary solutions. The same abilities (to work together across disciplines) transfer from doing cool stuff to tackling the big issues.

Associated Link: CHI 2005

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