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Contents | | | Preface | | | Introduction | | | Definition | | | Courses | | | Programs | | | Issues | | | References | | | Resources |
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ACM SIGCHI Curricula for Human-Computer Interaction
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by
Hewett, Baecker, Card, Carey, Gasen, Mantei, Perlman, Strong
and
Verplank
Copyright © 1992,1996 ACM SIGCHI |
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Contents | | | Preface | | | Introduction | | | Definition | | | Courses | | | Programs | | | Issues | | | References | | | Resources |
Last updated: 2008-04-11 Accesses since 1997-04-17: 99,658
Table of Contents
Often reports are written which seldom see utilization beyond their initial dissemination. We are particularly interested in seeing this report discussed, debated and used as much as possible by the broadest range of individuals with an interest in HCI. In order to facilitate its use, we offer the following specific suggestions concerning this report's use and the implementation of its recommendations.
One of the ways in which this report could be used is to assist in an individual's self assessment in HCI. Specifically, we can envision students, faculty, and professionals using it to assess their own strengths and weaknesses with respect to the content of the field. Students could use the report in a number of additional ways. For example, the content outline might be used to help them assess their level of career preparation at the end of their studies. Or, the report might be used to help a student select a university program which offers preparation in HCI. Certainly, we would hope that faculty will use the report to assist them in designing individual HCI courses and curricula. This report might also help groups of faculty to cooperatively review curricula as an aid in designing specializations within an interdisciplinary HCI focus. Non-academic professionals should also find the report helpful. For example, this report might well be used to help pinpoint pertinent areas for in-house training or continuing education in the form of tutorials or short courses.
While this entire report could be viewed as a resource, the articulation of content areas (Chapter 2) and the listing of resources (Appendix A) should be particularly useful for a variety of applications. For example, the overview of content areas should be helpful in designing new or revised courses which extend beyond those currently offered or those presented in this report. The annotated resource guide should be useful in pointing individuals to a variety of information sources on relevant topics in HCI, for purposes of research, teaching or continuing education.
Any new course or curriculum recommendation should be supported by documentation which includes the rationale for the effort. We intend that this report provide some of the supporting rationale and initial structure necessary for developing institution-specific recommendations within HCI. This type of information would be most helpful to faculty and administrators developing HCI courses or curricula within their respective institutions. It is assumed that this report can be viewed as a guide to program development, subject to modification based upon the specific requirements and situations present within each institution. One goal of the report has been to provide enough structural flexibility to make such adaptation possible.
Given the rapidly changing nature of HCI, the importance of keeping up to date within the field is an ongoing challenge. We hope that this report would be used to help assess and structure continuing education possibilities for faculty and professionals who are focusing within HCI. Both formal and informal methods of acquiring additional knowledge and skill within HCI could be structured by using the content areas within this report as a guide. We are particularly interested in encouraging innovative approaches to continuing education through exchanges of faculty and non-academic professionals between higher education research labs and centers and industry. In a field such as HCI, hands-on experience is critical to the development of skills, but the opportunity to reflect upon what one has done, why, and how well it worked is also critical. The HCI specialty of Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) might, for example, be used as a vehicle to create, share and develop continuing education possibilities between academia and industry.
A number of issues were left unresolved by our committee. This is not to say that we were uninterested in resolving them. We had to stop someplace. For example, we did not design courses for either the graduate level work or for continuing education. We did not design an independent HCI curriculum (although there are some initial attempts at such a curriculum described within this report and its appendices). We did not design courses or a curriculum for a school of design (although an increasing number of such schools are developing an interest in design issues in HCI). Nor did we grapple with identifying and delimiting the market for either the field or its students. Finally, we did not attempt to spell out specific careers paths which students of HCI might follow.
The course and curriculum issues discussed in this report are focused on undergraduate instruction. We have not tried to design a graduate program. However, at this stage in our thinking it seems that the mapping of the content areas into courses at the graduate level could be done in several ways, one of which includes up to five or six courses on the major topics, as broken down in our analysis in Chapter 3. Furthermore, based on discussions with several of our colleagues we are encouraged to believe that there exists at some institutions great potential for a truly interdisciplinary post graduate program in HCI which crosses departmental and even collegial boundaries.
We have also not tried to design courses for those working in a non-academic environment. We are confident, however, that those concerned with industrial training will be able to make use of the report as it is structured. Given our analysis of the content of the field and the mapping of that content into example courses, other course designers should be able to create an appropriate mapping of content into the design of short courses suitable for their own audiences. As mentioned above, the content description provides a framework against which to assess needed courses, the resource material should help the short-course designer find sources for course content, and the example courses can serve as models for still other courses with slightly different foci.
Only after attempting to design a curriculum can one fully appreciate the scope of the task involved. The CDG started out with the goal of developing an entire HCI curriculum-from Bachelor's Degree to Ph.D.-and ended up specifying four courses and two sample undergraduate curricula. Part of the complexity of curriculum design in this case arises from the relationship of HCI to many different disciplines, which suggests that an HCI curriculum could be housed comfortably in a number of different departments, e.g., Computer Science, Psychology, Information Systems, or Industrial Engineering. Furthermore, the boundaries of the HCI discipline are still fairly dynamic, as evidenced by recent emphasis upon computer-supported cooperative work with the necessary incorporation of pertinent social psychological and sociological theory. In summary, one of the tasks left undone by this group is the specification of how HCI relates to various established disciplines. We currently feel strongly that HCI appears by nature to be multidisciplinary and would hope, as HCI develops further, that it does not get absorbed into a single discipline. The study of HCI and its intimate relationship to a rapidly changing technology seems to require multiple points of view as a way of avoiding an overly narrow focus.
Being multidisciplinary also makes it difficult for HCI to be piggybacked onto existing model curricula, such as the Report of the ACM Task Force on the Core of Computer Science (Denning, et al., 1988). Certain content areas appropriate to HCI would surely suffer by constricting HCI entirely into a subarea of Computer Science, as seems to be recommended by the Denning report. On the other hand, there is a benefit to expanding upon such a vehicle as a computer science curriculum. Such expansion would make accreditation of an HCI program possible by housing it in a larger curriculum which is accreditable by the Computer Sciences Accreditation Board. As a result of the multidisciplinary content of HCI it seems probable that a similar case can be made for housing an HCI curriculum in any traditional discipline, accreditable or not. Currently, however, it seems that housing a full fledged HCI curriculum within an AACSB (American Association of Collegiate Schools of Business) accredited business school Information Systems program would be a difficult task as it appears that the need to include several different content areas would suffer and threaten AACSB accreditation. Therefore, our group has avoided specification of where HCI would best reside, leaving this up to implementers of individual programs.
An important issue of concern to university program administrators that has also been left out of consideration by this group concerns the market aspects of an HCI curriculum. For instance, this group did not consider issues of how many interested and available students there might be for HCI, both now and in the future; of how many jobs for those students might exist upon graduation; or of how many programs might be interested in incorporating our recommendations. Such estimations would have to be based on an assessment of the need for HCI education and projections for its growth over the next decade or so. Given our time and resource limitations, this group simply did not take these questions under consideration and leaves them for program administrators to evaluate for themselves. (However, as one might suspect, our best guess is that there will be growth in the need for graduates with the skills and knowledge provided by education in HCI.)
An additional issue closely related to marketing any new program or curriculum is that of potential career paths for graduates. This group did not address this issue which would involve generation of job descriptions and a skills inventory. HCI is so new and so rapidly changing that a skills inventory would be premature and obsolete as soon as it was published. As the discipline matures and stabilizes, a common set of exit skills and jobs for which those skills are used could be developed.
While this group did discuss issues of curriculum implementation, and many of them are mentioned in this chapter, general administrative aspects of curriculum implementation were not addressed, such as sources of program or faculty development funding. In addition, pathways for piecewise incorporation of HCI courses into different existing curricula were not described. The circumstances and details of individual programs and their administration make such recommendations on the part of this group inappropriate at this time. Furthermore, we trust to the creativity and imagination of our fellow educators in developing proposals for institution-specific recommendations to their own administrative decision makers.
We should also address the limitations of our recommendations in terms of the small size of our group and the representativeness or non-representativeness of its membership. While we feel comfortable with the definitions, content coverage and recommendations made, this was a relatively small group which did not represent all of the HCI-related disciplines. Although we tried to counter this limitation through the creation of a Curriculum Advisory Panel which was more broadly representative there are still limitations to the representativeness of this report, some of which we are aware and some of which neither our Advisory Panel nor our many volunteer reviewers have caught or addressed. One example of an area not explicitly represented in this report is the ongoing work on user interfaces in the artificial intelligence community. The interested reader should consult Sullivan and Tyler (1991) for a sample of the type of work currently going on in that area. Another example of a fruitful line of development in work on user interfaces not adequately represented in this report involves the relationships among the film, video, and graphic design disciplines and HCI, areas of emerging importance to the field.
Finally, the picture of the interface development process as described in some places in this report may seem rooted in the waterfall model of software development. Some of that impression comes from the organizational structure imposed on the report, some of it comes from our not having taken more careful pains to structure the report so as to avoid that impression. However, if one believes in the process of iterative design and prototyping, then the design-implement-evaluate sequence -- viewed as a rigid and inflexible series of steps, each one of which is to be completed before proceeding to the next -- no longer makes a great deal of sense, and promotes an unnecessarily limited view of design and evaluation. As argued by several authors (e.g., Gould and Lewis, 1985; Hewett, 1986; Norman, 1988) the first step in good design is evaluation and understanding of existing tools and practices in the existing task and work environment. This is especially true when existing practice is more and more likely to include computer use. Also, empirical evaluation of prototypes using real users is a key part of prototyping and iterative design. After-the-implementation evaluation is a practice of too little, too late which should be avoided.
In conclusion, we hope that this report will be useful to a variety of individuals with several different goals and intended applications. Both the report as a whole and our recommendations are meant to be taken in the spirit of a stimulus for further discussion and for eventual revision. If we have created a useful structure and some interest in furthering the field of HCI, especially in its promotion within the university community, then we will have accomplished our goal.
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Contents | | | Preface | | | Introduction | | | Definition | | | Courses | | | Programs | | | Issues | | | References | | | Resources | | | Top |