UX Research, HCI, & I - An Introductory Blog

When I think of HCI as a research field, the first thing that comes to my mind is a

kaleidoscope, always in a state of becoming, dependent on the perspective and spatio-temporal context from which it is viewed. Cooper and Bowers (1995) for example describe HCI as a “fragmented, contested, and dynamic” field. Similarly, Bødker’s description of three waves of HCI further highlights the overlapping and simultaneous existence of varying objectives and methods (Bødker 2006).

My initial understanding of HCI as a field was from a computer science perspective. I

graduated with a bachelor’s degree in engineering (Information Technology) in 2010, and of

course, my training upholds values of scientific rigor, precision, accuracy, generalizability,

mathematics etc. to produce accurate and reproducible program codes. After seven years of

working in the tech industry, I was in the middle of planning a career switch when I stumbled

upon HCI & Design. My introduction to the field was from Don Norman’s The Design of

Everyday Things IxD (Interaction design) website (What Is Human-Computer Interaction (HCI)? n.d.) and courses, and other such resources. IxD defines HCI as “a multidisciplinary field of study focusing on the design of computer technology, and particularly the interaction between humans (the users) and computers” (What Is Human-Computer Interaction (HCI)? n.d.). To my limited understanding back then HCI was synonymous to UI/UX design.

You can imagine my surprise then, when the first class I attended in my master’s program

- Foundations of HCI - had a list of articles with titles like “Do artifacts have politics?” (Winner 2017. In that class, we had discussions on Oppenhiemer and the atomic bomb and whether guns have agency, tomato harvesters and the harms it did to farm workers (Winner 2017), (J. Bardzell 2014) to name a few. In another class (Interaction design foundations), I learned about the “Three waves of HCI” (Bødker 2006) and somaesthetics (Höök 2018; Shusterman 2012; 1999), and “wicked problems” (Nelson and Stolterman 2014). Our project was on one such, intractable, mutli-factorial wicked problem of Food Insecurity! What was probably more surprising to me. then was that I loved every minute of it. Thus, in the first semester, I was enchanted by a whole new world which was simultaneously strange and familiar. It was strange because in my career up to that point, I had never even heard about critical theory, wicked problems, and the processes that go into creative problem solving. And yet, it was familiar because this exposure introduced me to a discursive language to talk about what I have always wanted to say but could not find the

right vocabulary to say it.

As such, the quality assurance engineer in me was reintroduced to the “human” in HCI as

a thinking, feeling person, not just an “user” of the technology. I learned that “Interactions'' was not limited to well-designed HTML and css codes, but also includes social context of

technologies, principles of embodied interactions (Dourish 2001), John Dewey and “an

experience” (J. McCarthy and Wright 2007), participatory design (Schuler and Namioka 1993), contextual design (Holtzblatt 2007) and so on. It also needs user research methods such as toolboxes, and what if cards, mapping, auto-ethnography, and ethnography. And theoretical philosophies of critical, reflexive, feminist, queer, sustainable HCI. And, I have only begun my journey!

This blog space is to showcase the on-going formation of my UX research process. I intend to make posts that reflect over my Masters projects, my published works, as well as various methods.

(This blog is derived from parts of my dissertation thesis)