saint thomas aquinas the philosopher argues that everything has an essence an ideal at its core and an existence an appearance and manifestation in the real world the only thing in the universe whose essence and existence are identical according to aquinas is god anything else you me this microphone and the scientific discipline of hci will have discrepancies between what is essential and what is existential to it human computer interaction or hci for short is a phrase that we hear a lot in the context of design innovation computer science digital products it is obviously very relevant to our lives because most of what we do today is basically human computer interaction it's literally what we do with most of our waking hours right now as i record this episode i am interacting with multiple computers my camera is actually a computer i'm looking at my notes on some sort of computer my phone also a computer could ring at any time and as you are watching or listening to this episode you are also performing some kind of human computer interaction even in our sleep we interact with computers you know some of us measure our sleep with smart watches or rings and most of us actually wake up to some kind of digital alarm clock this phenomenon of hci the experience of it is everywhere it is the defining feature of human life today this is hci as a phenomenon it's the fact that we live with computers and it's not only these keyboard and mouse and screen kind of things but anything that involves digital components your dishwasher your tv your car but when you hear people talking about hci it's probable that they are not only talking about the phenomenon of using a computer but rather they are talking about a profession or discipline which deals with this phenomenon so human computer interaction is the name of what happens but it is also the name of the scientific and professional field where people have the job of analyzing it and designing it this the scientific and professional discipline that is called hci is what we're going to talk about in this episode of design discipline my name is mahmoud aidan baitash i'm a scholar of design and technology and research in hci is basically my job i design and develop hci applications i write about hci i manage research projects i teach hci at the university and i feel incredibly privileged to be working in this field because computers and the ways that we use them are essential to our lives hci is basically the defining feature of human life and culture today naturally there's a lot of interest in hci as a profession a lot of people are interested in getting hci related jobs companies are looking for hundreds of different kinds of professionals that have to do with computing and design and user interfaces in the world of academic research where getting funding is a significant challenge for all of us hci researchers are actually treated a little more generously compared to our colleagues in like social sciences or the arts however compared to the level of interest and the relevance of the phenomenon of hci the actual profession of hci is quite small and it's quite challenging to get into and the challenge here is largely because a lot of people when they start out don't have a mental model of hci as a scientific field which has enough detail and enough clarity i'll give you an example around a year ago i was involved in a university project and i teamed up with two professors and we had the job of hiring two hci researchers we had two positions for phd researchers and we got more than 200 applications for these positions most of the people who applied were very smart and very successful some of them were great engineers some were designers entrepreneurs and different kinds of scientists very smart people very cool skills and experiences that they brought but out of 200 people most of whom were very impressive there was only like 10 of them who really understood the field of hci so they all understood hci as a phenomenon and most of them understood the essential ideas the ideals of hci as a scientific and professional field but only around five percent of them actually understood like the boundaries and the landscape of hci in terms of its existential facts and naturally those people were the ones that we interviewed for the jobs so what i'm going to talk about now is going to help those of you who are interested in hci as a profession especially those of you who are looking at graduate studies and especially phd programs in hci and there are two reasons why we focus on this the first is that a few days ago i actually posted on twitter asking the community for what questions to cover in in this episode about hci and one of the most salient requests was to talk about how to get into hci phd programs so with a shout out to faria and others who submitted questions we're going to talk about some of the concepts you need for this exact purpose the second reason why this is especially relevant to phd studies is that in fact even though the phenomena of computers are everywhere in our lives hci as a profession actually refers to a very particular niche within academic and scientific research and this is my first point there isn't really a job or position that is called hci which exists purely in the world of business at companies in this way it's different from other jobs like being a programmer or engineer or graphic designer or psychologist because even though many universities have these programs where you can study hci jobs like hci designer or hci manager things like that don't really exist basically the only job where you would have hci in your actual job title in an actual company is the job of a hci researcher and these jobs are really rare they basically exist only at these large tech companies with big budgets for innovation and research in fact i went on linkedin to search for these jobs and found only two of them among thousands of jobs on linkedin at microsoft and spotify and both of them list as their requirements that you should have a phd and you should have published your research at particular scientific conferences and journals and this is the first thing that confuses people because the essence or the ideal of hci is very broad you know if you go to any other resource like various books and lectures and whatnot usually they will hit you with a very long and very complicated definition wikipedia will tell you for example that hci is a multi-disciplinary field of study based on the design and use of computer technology in particular the interfaces between computers and users it's very broad it's very inclusive it's trying to do justice to all that hci is and all that it could be but the reality the existential fact is that hci is the name of a very particular niche in scientific and academic research so this is the first thing that you need to understand if you're looking at hci as a job it's the fact that hci is a research discipline and therefore it is subject to all of the concerns and constraints that apply to all kinds of like scientific and academic research disciplines so if you want to become a hci researcher you kind of have to be interested in like the rigor and philosophy of science and academia you will need to read thousands of research papers and write a lot of your own you need to engage with the academic world with the ecosystem of like universities and academic careers and research funding and conferences and journals you might have to teach courses and give lectures and all of this is actually going to take up most of your time to the extent that you will have very little time left to create actual products most professional hci researchers actually don't design anything in a hands-on fashion they don't develop a lot of software now there are exceptions to this for example there is a hci research conference called user interface software and technology or uist where a lot of technical and tactical work is presented and there are some design related venues as well but on the vast majority of these projects the people who are doing this hands-on work are actually graduate students so it's only at the earliest stages of this career where you will actually get to do the hands-on work later as a professional hci researcher you might be on a team where you collaborate with people who do these things but your job will not be to design user interfaces and to develop different gadgets in fact your job as a hci researcher is much closer to being an analyst a critic a teacher a philosopher and even a project manager much more than it is to being a designer or developer this is the first thing that you need to clear up if you're interested in hci as a profession a lot of people who think they are interested in hci are actually more interested in design or development which are different disciplines now these jobs do have some overlap since they basically deal with the same subject matter of like user interfaces they are definitely related uh researchers designers and developers very often work together in teams a lot of people switch between these jobs at various points in their career and you can definitely get an education in one of these things and get a job in the other in fact if you study hci it will lead you to a lot of different jobs in product design or engineering or marketing sales user experience research but the work that you would do as a professional hci researcher is different from those and it's very specific so what then is the actual work that a hci researcher does now the answer to this gets complicated sometimes because people in hci actually really love to like debate the boundaries and the philosophy of what we do but after like 10 years of wading through all of those debates i believe that i have come to an answer which is actually quite simple the answer is that hci is part of computer science hci is the part of computer science which builds on social sciences and humanities so let's talk about the two parts of this first of all the idea that hci is a part of computer science it's a subset of computer science has to do with the fact of where it exists in practice the absolute existential core of any scientific discipline today is publications any scientific field first of all exists as a collection of written documents it's books or journal articles and conference papers and if you look at the conferences and journals which define hci which are truly the infrastructure for the scientific community these are produced by organizations which define themselves in terms of computer science and engineering the two largest ones are the acm or the association for computing machinery and ieee which is the institute of electrical and electronics engineers now people do argue that hci extends beyond computer science which it does but my view is that when it does it also extends the borders of computer science it redefines what computer science is but all of this philosophy aside what follows for practical purposes is that being a hci researcher means that you are a computer scientist and if you are a computer scientist then you will be expected to command the knowledge and skills that a competent computer scientist would possess even though in hci you might specialize in methods and philosophies that come from elsewhere as we will soon discuss your work is most probably going to involve computer science topics and you will have to have the competence to deal with these like algorithms and data structures information theory graphics signal processing machine learning electronics software engineering you can't avoid or outsource dealing with these topics as a hci researcher you don't have to be an expert on all of these but in order to do your work you need to have a command of the basics and furthermore many professors and other leaders who recruit for hci related positions are themselves computer scientists and engineers so being able to speak the same language as these people will carry you forward in the hiring process so that's my argument that for a career in hci you really do need a strong foundation in computer science but there's one more thing you need which is again a foundation and ideally a specialization in the social sciences and the humanities i'm not going to go too deep into the history of hci which we might do in a future episode but very briefly the origin of hci as a branch of computer science really materializes in the 80s there's a book from 1983 which really stands out it's called the psychology of human computer interaction and basically what's happening here is that the authors of this book are taking assumptions methods results and arguments from psychology and from that they are deriving answers about how to design computers so they expand computer science and psychology towards each other they kick off this interdisciplinary field called hci and over the years what happens is that people start bringing in other branches of social sciences and humanities into hci if you actually get involved in hci you will see that people talk about these three waves or intellectual movements that define its its history and evolution psychology and computer science coming together is the first wave of hci the second wave is the rest of the social sciences coming into it moving together with developments in computer technologies and devices and of course the internet in order to deal with the new kinds of like questions and possibilities that come from this technology we bring assumptions and methods from disciplines like anthropology and sociology and media studies and more and we're applying those to the phenomenon of hci so gradually a lot of new ways of thinking and doing research become accepted in hci the third wave of hci then is the same thing happening with humanities as technology and computers become ingrained in our lives and the incredible ways that we have today it actually becomes possible and even necessary to use methods and philosophies from like literature philosophy critical theory arts and of course design in order to make sense of the place and the possibilities of computers in our lives having gone through these movements hci today is a diverse and inclusive branch of computer science where we take knowledge and methods or if you want to be technical about it we take the epistemologies and methodologies from schools of thought which traditionally have nothing to do with computer science and we use them to figure out how to deal with all of this technology it's a very fortunate very beautiful place to be and having learned from this history hci today is a very uh tolerant very inclusive place where ideals that might not initially make sense to computer scientists might get accepted and this brings me to my final point because this tolerance and inclusivity is a double-edged sword on one hand it allows us to consider unconventional ideas it frees us from prejudice and it paves the way to innovation and invention not to mention that it creates a beautiful community where all kinds of individuals are accepted on the other hand it certainly makes it difficult for outsiders and beginners to make sense of what we're doing and it makes it difficult for us to have standards and recognize really high quality and really meaningful work so what does this mean for someone who's interested in joining the world of hci well it means that in addition to being a citizen of the academic world and mastering its rituals in addition to being a competent computer scientist there is a third area of competence which you need to command and this is the social sciences and humanities now you don't need to be a master of the entire landscape here although it definitely pays off to have like knowledge of the whole spectrum but when you come into hci you should come equipped with let's say the equivalent of a university degree in terms of your skill and competence in one of those fields like psychology or anthropology or critical theory or sociology and of course design i know that this is a lot of work it takes many years to cultivate this competence in computer science as well as let's say anthropology and this exactly is the reason why most hci schools are graduate level they are masters and phd programs because this gives you the time to cultivate these skills and also familiarize with the rest of the academic ecosystem in the previous years of your schooling but going back to the question of what you will need in hci if you have this combination of skills which is first of all an interest in academic research and then competence in computer science and then a branch of social sciences or humanities including but not limited to some kind of design discipline and maybe you can add to that the specific things that your project or your team might specialize in you will be unstoppable you'll have no problem getting into a hci program you'll have no problem going through it and you'll have no problem succeeding in the rest of your career as a hci professional if you've been looking at hci programs or maybe you're already in a hci school and you realize that there are parts of this combination of topics that you're not really super excited about that's actually totally fine you can find projects and team up with people where you focus on maybe software development maybe graphic design maybe ethnographic research whatever you enjoy simply realizing that hci is the name of a branch of computer science research which brings in the social sciences and humanities allows you to make sense of things and make faster and easier progress in future episodes of design discipline we're going to continue to explore the world of hci we have already had guests like joe fishkay and eric stoltharmon who have had a very successful and very different careers in this world we are gonna have many more conversations with people from the world of hci and we are going to talk about a lot of concepts from this world where design and technology and philosophy all come together make sure to subscribe to our youtube channel and to subscribe to our podcast follow us on instagram and twitter at design discipline d-e-s-i-g-n-d-i-s-c-i-p-l-i-n and for the ultimate experience visit our website and subscribe to our newsletter at designdiscipline.com d-e-s-i-g-n-d-i-s-c-i-p-l-i-n dot com