Adaptive Path Blog

I recently let my membership to the ACM run out. This marks the end of a 10-year relationship that has been on the rocks for at least the past 5. I gave up on the CHI conference about 4 years ago and was mostly holding on for Interactions, the journal from SigCHI. But it has been a very long time since I was excited or eager for a new issue. Sure, Don Norman or Aaron Marcus usually have something interesting to say and everybody loves Ok/Cancel. But two short columns and a comic are not enough to carry a journal. The content has been getting less and less relevant to the ideas and problems of HCI practitioners, at least for me and folks I know.

Take the most recent issue for an example: Weights and Measures: Quantifying Usability. Does “usability” as it is commonly practiced really need to become more quantitative? Is anyone picking up a copy of Interactions, “the premier publication in HCI,” to learn basic statistics or hear yet another person attempt to answer the “how many participants is enough?” question. (The answer as always is “it depends.”) I don’t want to deride any of the authors in this issue. They are all clearly knowledgeable and do a good job of covering their subjects. But why were they brought together in the first place? Why was this topic chosen over more challenging or timely topics like qualitative research, embracing social science, or service design? Who is this publication written for?

Human-computer interaction as a field has expanded enormously in the last 2 decades and especially in the last 5-7 years. The core of the discipline has moved outside of computer science to include designers, social scientists, and others. Yet this publication still seems to be written primarily by and for computer scientists. Unlike many HCI practitioners and researchers these days, I actually have a computer science degree but that training has become less and less relevant as I’ve had to engage more and more of the human side of HCI. I have grown and changed a lot over the last 10 years and it seems that the ACM and I have grown apart. I’ve tried to make it work but a guy can only hold on for so long. Breaking up is hard to do but, baby, it’s not me, it’s you.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 30th, 2006 at 12:19 pm and is filed under The Big Picture, What Were They Thinking?. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.