It’s been a full year since I moved back to Atlanta to join Georgia Tech’s Human-Centered Computing PhD program—and consequently moved away from my job as a user experience designer. Over that time, I’ve had a number of interesting conversations with friends, former colleagues, and other HCC students, all curious to know what I (or in the case of other HCC students what “we”) actually do.  Usually I try to head this discussion off with a glib response. I usually start off with ”I do research.” If my interlocutor is persistent enough to ask what I actually study, I say “I study the future.”

But recently I’ve come to regard that latter statement as a real key to understanding the somewhat confused nature of our nascent field of Human-Centered Computing. Are we mere record-keepers of the state-of-the-art—observing and interviewing people about their relationship to technology for the benefit of techno-historians? Or are we trying to use our observations of the present to help shape the future?

In traditional Computer Science (an outgrowth of the engineering school paradigm), the label “future studies” might actually make sense. My CS Phd colleagues are busy inventing new encryption strategies, or re-architecting the Internet, or optimizing multi-core processing algorithms—all necessary preconditions for technologies which will be ready for prime time in the next 5-1o years. Industry research havens like Bell Labs and Xerox PARC (both still alive but in humbled reincarnations) are no longer the lifeblood of CS innovation they once were. As a result, industry is an important partner in the academic research process, to such an extent that important discoveries made by today’s computer scientists really are quite likely to be translated into future products and thus shape the future.

But the relationship between interaction design and academic HCI(Human-Computer Interaction) is significantly more strained. A company like Microsoft doesn’t need an academic partner to create new interaction strategies; to my knowledge, the Surface tabletop computer was created mainly in-house with some consulting provided by my former employer. In fact, I think I can assert uncontroversially that if you want to explore new ways of visualizing information, create new and compelling interaction techniques, or otherwise revolutionize the way humans and computers interact, you are equally likely to succeed outside the ivory tower as within. Google may have started as a Stanford academic project, but its founders had to leave academe to really make it a success. And as for Apple? They’re notoriously secretive, even and especially within industry—and yet they’ve had more impact on our relationships with machines than any other company in the last 20 years.

The reasons for this are simple enough. In general, new HCI techniques in themselves aren’t feats of engineering, but they are judged based on qualities such as robustness and speed, and thus require a lot of cash to design, test and bring to market. Which do you think would produce a better product faster: hiring a bunch of distracted interns and compensating them with course credit and a small stipend, or turning to a team of seasoned professionals accustomed to fast-paced large-scale projects?  This means that someone with a fantastic concept for a new service or product can (and probably should) get some venture funding and create a start-up to make his or her dream a reality.

There are ways around this conundrum, of course, and I certainly don’t view academics’ efforts as wasted, otherwise I would have stayed in industry myself. The ‘living laboratory’ technique has been used to great effect. There’s a room somewhere in the MIT Media Lab where post-it notes are interactive, and Georgia Tech’s Aware Home is anything but an ordinary house. The ‘Wizard of Oz’ technique (in which a man or woman behind the curtain imbues an interface with more intelligence than is currently possible or pragmatic in order to study the interaction) is also pretty effective, although completely unscalable. [See Neal Stephenson's "The Diamond Age" for my favorite literary example of Wizard of Oz techniques 'in use'] I’ve used these and other techniques with much success—card sorts, paper prototypes, and GOFUS (Good Old Fashioned Usability Studies).Using these techniques a researcher can skip over some present-day technical hurdles and get to the good stuff faster. If we could solve the lag issue, or if we had more advanced voice recognition, here’s what the future would look like.

But for many Human-Centered Computing (HCC) researchers these techniques are just totally impractical for two main reasons: they don’t afford studying social effects, and they ignore one half of the equation: when we bring real people into our labs or research settings, we are studying people from today—with today’s expectations and biases.

So what are we to do? Ethnographic “deep hanging out”, semi-structured interviews and other ‘qualitative’ techniques offer one way out. By getting deep insight into the complex interplay between person, social cohort, technology, and physical environment, we also unlock the information firehose that is people’s everyday lives. If, through studying today’s technology, we can gain future-proof insights into what makes people tick, we can provide solid guidelines for the future and offer a service to humanity, both key goals of any academic institution.  But again, we run up against the difficulty that today’s immutable biases may simply be hard-coded cultural trends that will wear off.

For example, when preparing for my research into privacy effects and online photo-sharing, I read over and over that people prefer to share personal photos via email rather than sharing sites. And indeed, for a certain kind of person even just four years ago, this was technically true. But I found that what was really motivating this was the desire of people in the Kodak Culture (you can generally guess what that means, I hope) to tell different stories through their photos to different audiences, and to share through a medium over which they felt they had control. Email’s reliability and distribution control (ignoring the “forward” button for the moment) allowed people to mimic the kinds of practices they had been used to with in-person or by-mail photo-sharing pre-computer.

But what did I actually find? I generated some ‘design implications’ and got some solid data about people’s motivations and desires with respect to online photo-sharing. I also showed that many of the tenets of ‘Kodak Culture’ which had been observed in the film photography days were still operating, at least in America (cellphone photography had not yet hit our shores) and at least for that moment. But what I still don’t know is the extent to which I was simply observing a cultural moment, and the degree to which the photo-sharing norms and mores of my participants will simply disappear with them and not be carried on in the next generation. In short, my vision of the future was severely constricted by the very things that made my research successful in the short term.

To deal with this, much of our work in HCC proceeds by positing an underlying set of motivations and desires that we hope are future-proof, and then re-imagining them in the context of future or bleeding-edge technology.  Nokia’s Jan Chipchase calls this process “future perfect.” I still suspect there’s a fundamental re-evaluation of the role of the future in HCC waiting to happen, and I’m interested to think what others in the field (or at least in the bivouac) have to say. Have I uncharitably mischaracterized your work, or your vision of the field? Comment below, or email me here.