Presentation on the Contemporary Research in HCI

Slides (without notes) of a 1-hour lecture on the Contemporary Research in HCI I gave to students of the UPF Master Program in Information, Communication and Audiovisual Media Technologies. First, I briefly introduced the raison d’être of research in HCI, the methods applied in the field and the growing pains. Then, I categorized the current research areas by clustering the many paper tracks from this year’s CHI. The idea was to show the variety of the themes and exemplify the eclectic approaches in 4 arbitrarily picked tracks. I presented Y! Research’s work on understanding tagging behaviors, my research proposal in location-aware systems, Nicolas Ducheneaut‘s study of online gaming communities and the latest surface computing buzz (to reveal the importance of HCI research to balance with such technological breakthrough). I could have picked many other examples, but I intended to focus on the type of research that show a direct impact to design from the problem statement to the “product”. Finally, I mentioned a couple of themes (selfishly close to my interests) that might raise more attention in the future: the design for everyware, human-robot interaction and corporate ethnography.

Relation to my thesis: a healthy and fun to do exercise to describe my domain.