The BirdbassadorAn unprecedented third blog post from me over the last few days, this one about how working in human computer interaction often feels like sitting at the kids table during thanksgiving https://medium.com/@mcorrell/the-othering-of-hci-ab0a07edc69f
i swear this is the last work post for a while; the next bit of writing i have lined up is about anime and necropolitics and is going to be so dire that i am getting goosebumps just thinking about it
Brian C. Keegan, Ph.D.@Birdbassador Arriving at the end of your post, I couldn’t help thinking about @jbigham’s Law (“The two hardest problems in CS are (1) people and (2) convincing computer scientists it’s people”)
I found myself wondering whether HCI should stop trying to save computer scientists from themselves: I’m not excited about append-only databases, fancy autocomplete, or piece work.
So much of the “participatory design” in HCI is neutered from post-war consensus around labor politics. I’d start there.
@bkeegan @jbigham
yeah, there's a quasi-legitimacy trap argument to be made that if your goal is to promote human dignity and flourishing in our relationship with technology, you've already made several fatally limiting structural choices by doing so from within/next to/within the confines of STEM academia
yeah, there's a quasi-legitimacy trap argument to be made that if your goal is to promote human dignity and flourishing in our relationship with technology, you've already made several fatally limiting structural choices by doing so from within/next to/within the confines of STEM academia
Florian 'floe' Echtler@Birdbassador Thank you for an excellent post. There is one more thing, IMHO (which is already hinted at in the part about "HCI as the Borg"): the infighting.
Because it seems to me that you can fractally subdivide HCI, starting with the big "quant" vs. "qual" animosity, and then continue all the way down until you have individual researchers trying to make up their own special niche that nobody else is allowed into. 😑
@floe yes, it would be fine if there was a big tent of diverse methods all coexisting together, but they often seem to operate oppositionally and exclusionarily and with mutual disdain.