Stuart Nicholson: The man to bring HCI away from the ivory tower and to the masses

My triangle consisted of Stuart Nicholson, Dan Howard and myself. This week I interviewed Stuart Nicholson, to find out his understanding of the field of HCI, and how that related to his research interests and aspirations. Finally I will be making some recommendations for him based on this.

Stuart is a very hands-on person, and liked the Tangible Computing field of HCI. He elaborated that he liked how the focus of the field was on practical day-to-day applications rather than research novelties, which are restricted in their wider applicability. For example, Brygg Ulmer’s defence thesis highlighted a number of practical deployments which were useful to manipulate virtual information, which Stuart highlighted, really appealed to his own research motivations.

This very much links in what Stuart didn’t engage with as much in HCI: ambiguity and the discussions on its usefulness in design. He felt it was too conceptual, and partly attributes his disengagement with this topic being one of the first few topics he was introduced to in the field. Not a very friendly introduction to HCI in his book! Stuart also analysed the field as a whole and commented that the distinctions between the various constituent fields of HCI e.g. PD, TUI, UbiComp etc. are arbitrary and sometimes undistinguishable. In his words, it is a “overlapping, blurry mess”.

Thus, Stuart would like to learn more about these individual constituents and how they are part of the HCI narrative since its inception. In his vision for the rest of the module, he would like more of an analysis on the important contributions of the field to the wider scientific discourse, rather than a narrow focus on individual contributions. This, he feels, will enable him to get a better grasp of the length and breadth of the field, and in many ways help him better navigate the distinctions in the field. His love for HCI as a field is evident from the positive adjectives he uses throughout our interview.

As mentioned earlier, Stuart is very much hands-on, and this shows in his current research at Open Lab as well. He is interested in continuing the work he began in his previous role as an MSc student: rolling out a display communication system for rural contexts. This involves setting up a formalised process to source hardware (TV Monitors etc.), network of volunteers etc. and a infrastructure built around sustainability and scalability to ensure its replicability. This system will enable rural communities to have situated displays, where information is shared about the local community and areas of interest to them.

I’ve identified Nick Taylor (a former post-doc at Culture Lab), a Dundee Fellow and Lecturer at the University of Dundee (http://www.dundee.ac.uk/djcad/staff/nicktaylor/). His research interests suggest he would be a good person to speak to for Stuart to engage more in displays in rural public space. Nick also has a strong focus on sustainability and legacy, thus another criterion for Stuart being met there.

The two papers I have identified for Stuart are:

Taylor, Nick, and Keith Cheverst. “Exploring the use of non-digital situated displays in a rural community.” OZCHI 2008 Workshop on Public and Situated Displays to Support Communities. 2008.

Memarovic, Nemanja, et al. “Tethered or free to roam: the design space of limiting content access on community displays.” Proceedings of the 2nd ACM International Symposium on Pervasive Displays. ACM, 2013.