Reeves: HCI as science: Don’t worry, be happy?

Stuart Reeve’s 2015 paper Human-computer interaction as science deals with the “long and troublesome relationship” between HCI and science. According to Reeves, HCI can be viewed as “a poor scientific discipline” and one that suffers from a severe case of status anxiety.  He argues that this anxiety manifests itself in two interrelated areas – incoherence and intellectual inadequacy.

To help us understand the origins of these concerns Reeves takes us back to HCI’s formation, describing its emergence from pioneering labs looking to solve a “construction problem” involving control of a computer system at a time when basic “atheoretic trial and error engineering approaches” were typical. An important step in HCI’s development came when theories from cognitive science were used to create what Reeves refers to as a “scientific deign space”; that is to say a science “of design” rather than a scientific study of it. In theory this was seen to offer a way of “explaining why interfaces failed or succeeded and thus predicatively guiding design work”. Stuart Card among others had an important role in the development of these theories that offered the potential to tame “the apparent ‘irrationality’ of design work”, transforming it into “a system with regular, discoverable laws” (Simon).

The idea of the design space then appeared to offer a solution to some of the disciplinary anxieties of HCI. But Reeves sees conceptual problems with it. He describes how “the methods of this approach end up deciding the problems to be tackled”, putting the cart before the horse. In Reeve’s view this is at least partly simply in order to bring HCI “closer towards a scientific disciplinarity” in order to address HCI’s status anxiety.

So if viewing HCI as science is not the answer then how are we as proto HCI researchers to proceed? In his conclusion Reeves gives us his prescription. Firstly, “stop worrying about being scientific or engaging in ‘science talk’ instead focus on working with “appropriate forms of rigour” and secondly “stop worrying about ‘being a discipline’ and instead engage with the idea of being “interdisciplinary”.

To a newcomer to the field I can relate to a statement Reeves makes in his introduction: “An external view of HCI’s disciplinary status could assume that it is secure”. That was certainly my view of it, so it has come as a surprise to see the apparent internal insecurities that Reeves describes in the article. From the outside the interdisciplinarity of HCI seems both necessary and a main feature of HCI’s appeal. The main thrust of this paper which urges us to stop worrying about whether we are “scientific” and instead to focus on acting as “catalytic interdiscipline” is advice that I am really keen to explore as I begin my research. And who needs ‘status anxiety’ anyway? As Stuart Reeves and Bobby McFerin put it “Don’t worry, be happy!” Just focus on working at the “interface of disciplines, forget the formal-scientific and “every little thing gonna be alright”.

The paper I’ve chosen to read this week is  FlexCase: Enhancing Mobile Interaction with a Flexible Sensing and Display Cover.