ICAT Playdate: Interdisciplinarity in HCI: What happened in our big tent?

Term: Fall 2025

Date: September 26th, 2025

Time: 8:30 to 9:30 a.m.

Location: Community Assembly in the Creativity + Innovation District Living-Learning Community

Instructor: Phyllis Newbill

Presented By: Institute for Creativity, Arts, and Technology (ICAT)

Description:

It isn't surprising that HCI (Human Computer Interaction) is an interdisciplinary area. Understanding and engineering meaningful interactions between human and computers requires leveraging and integrating lots of different knowledge about humans and about computing. But it was never a given that HCI would adopt and pursue a particularly ambitious conception of interdisciplinarity as a core value and practice. Indeed, especially in the 1980s and 1990s, this was an intentional and cultivated achievement. However, in specific ways, one could argue that interdisciplinarity is trending down in HCI. But why? In this talk, I examine aspects of interdisciplinarity in HCI, including both achievements and challenges. I think more interdisciplinarity is better, and that we can only achieve it deliberately.

Speakers:

John M. Carroll, Distinguished Professor Emeritus, Penn State,