Evolving Evaluation from Engineers to Experience:
    What History can Teach us About Evaluation in HCI

      Joseph ‘Jofish’Kaye, Cornell Univ.
jofishcornell.edu

Seminar on People, Computers, and Design

Human-Computer Interaction sits at the boundary between technical and social practice. Unlike entirely technical disciplines, we cannot always evaluate our work on clearly defined criteria such as bits-per-second or megahertz. Unlike social science disciplines, our focus on the /building /of novel technology requires evaluation to determine what (intended and unintended) effects are induced by that particularly technology. Over the history of HCI, different criteria have been key for evaluation, and these criteria have changed and shifted over time. In this talk, I'll discuss the evolution of HCI's notion of evaluation, and redefinitions over time of what HCI considers valid knowledge. I culminate with case studies showing how this understanding may be of use in light of current questions about the evaluation of experience-focused rather than task-focused HCI

Joseph ‘Jofish’Kaye is a Ph.D Candidate in Information Science at Cornell University. He recently spent six months as a Visiting Researcher at Microsoft Research Cambridge, and has also worked with the Domestic Design & Technology Research Group at Intel and several startups. His work includes ethnographic, cultural, critical and technological studies of, among other topics, academics’archiving practices, couples in long distance relationships, affective computing, ubiquitous computing, social networking, and smart homes and kitchens. He has a B.S. in Cognitive Science from MIT, and Masters degrees in Media Arts & Sciences from MIT and Information Science from Cornell.

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