IndiaHCI 2015 from the eyes of a newcomer
As someone still finding his feet in HCI, IndiaHCI was an amazing experience, helping me learn more about a field largely misunderstood by many.
With over 200 people coming together for three days and discussing about the good, the bad and the ugly in the field of Human-Computer Interaction against the backdrop of the scenic clouds and hills in IIT Guwahati, I was attending a conference after a long time and this was my first one on HCI. I had learned never to make any assumptions. As a first timer, these were my insights —
C in HCI is the bad apple
Naming things has been a well known problem and it is true even in the case of HCI/UX/Whatever you want to call it.
Scott Klemmer’s explanation about HCI can easily be extended to any device or service which is used by people. The focus is not on computers, but rather on humans and designing a solution for them. The wordplay of the terms HCI and UX has created confusion and often led to false representations. But one thing is clear —
If the things you build are used by humans, you will build better things if you know about HCI.
Look around you and try to find a job which does not require to deal with a machine(or cribbing about how to make a smarter machine). With software’s increasing appetite, it’s just a matter of time when daily mundane devices are equipped with an embedded circuit and turned into smart daily mundane devices with the same human operating it.
A short paper about the word analysis done on all the previous papers presented at IndiaHCI corroborated this. The word ‘computer’ was not one of the most common words, instead it was dominated by words like ‘design’, ‘user-study’ and ‘analysis’.
Augmentation, not Automation
The buzz at IndiaHCI 2015 was centered around making the user more efficient and productive rather that replacing him/her with a machine. The opening keynote by Dr. Shengdong Zhao from the National University of Singapore showed a way how humans and computers together can draw faster, setting the tone for the next three days.
Automation of tasks offer speed and reliability at the cost of innovation and originality. Having the right balance of human input for the creative part and the power of computing for the repetitive and number crunching tasks will help us find the sweet spot where the best products and services belong.
Focus on the Indian scenario and Education
With the growing internet and smartphone penetration to rural India, user studies and design ideas concerning education and the Indian scenario was definitely a talking point. Pankaj Doke’s paper on Mobile Phone Usage by Low Literate Users presented a perspective to ponder upon. It was a paper which demonstrated the increasing smartphone usage among the less educated people and the security threats associated with it.
The best paper of the conference, A Protocol to Evaluate Virtual Keyboards for Indian Languages was an enormous user study done by a team from IDC, IIT Bombay. Other innovative ideas for education were also presented, like trying to redesign multi-grade schools, using gesture based technology in education, helping autistic kids to understand money denominations using a tangible weigh scale, a tool to help foreigners learn hindi and a virtual reality tour of the golconda fort to help students.
Roles change over time
IndiaHCI was an opportunity to meet people and check out the work done at the research labs of Microsoft, Xerox, TCS. I was particularly impressed by two research projects. Informatica’s data profiling case study about providing a better solution to to view and interpret databases in a data intensive environment will surely help developers and marketers to gain more insights and increase productivity. SAP’s design thinking kit was an innovative solution to use case discovery for Internet-Of-Things projects. Using it is as simple as playing with toys and is is great for getting people from different disciplines to contribute to the design process.
The people associated with these projects hailed from various backgrounds. Some had studied engineering, some design and some recent ones architecture. It was rare to find someone who had not made transistions in his/her career.
Looking back at some of the jobs today didn’t even exist ten years ago, it is not surprising that not many people called themselves user experience designers back then(it would have been interesting to get a list of the job roles of the attendees) and looking ten years into the future, new roles will emerge as design grows as a discipline. So anyone who is currently studying HCI, there is a good chance that the job role you will have 10–15 years from now doesn’t have a name right now.
Taking the next step
Why aren’t these projects being implemented in the real world? Is a question which was asked a lot at IndiaHCI. Some of the student research projects are potentially the next big idea, but due to some reason, a majority of them never proceed further than the prototype stage. The students end up joining companies at the end of their course and the professors have too little time to make any significant move. Encouraging the students by giving them entrepreneurial advice and small seed funds to scale their idea might be a good first step.
The projects at corporate research also face the same fate. Most of the big organizations have slow and tedious decision making processes, leaving a lot of corporate projects in limbo in the confidential vault.
Last year I was around people who said they didn’t have an idea for a startup. This year I am seeing well thought ideas, but people not having the time or resources to make a startup. Ideas are cheap, anyway.
Conclusion
I didn’t know what to expect at IndiaHCI as a beginner. But after three days I realized one thing — You know that problem you have been stuck on for weeks? Yes, that problem about your design process or user research or about studying UX, there is always someone here at the conference who has also faced your problem. Have a talk with them, collaborate and discuss it. Designers do have a history of interesting debates.
Finally, here is news about the next one…
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