A moments pause to reflect on the meaning of HCI.

I was talking to a college at the OU who is best described as that irritating bit of sand which a clam swallows to generate a Perl.
We got on to the problem of what makes HCI different from general design. I said that it was partly the level of degree between the kinds of complexity a physical product can have against the complexity a digital product affords.

Being from a philosophical background (I think) he said he would not accept anything without a clear categorical difference. I then said, that most physical products are based on physics, we can intuitively predict them using our knowledge of the real world. Where computing gets different is that the affordances are from logic, mathematics and sometimes probability – things people are generally bad at. We agreed you could skip over all products where the computer was just the more complex way of doing a physical or electrical thing. If you press a button and the light goes on even if a computer is doing all the work it’s not ‘computing’ in the sense we agreed to mean it.

While I still think that complexity is an issue, the kinds of mental models we can build up for truly digital products is different (bigger) for other products. The notion of physical, mental models vs logic, mental models is curious.

If I wasn’t busy with chi deadline, I might do some research. The one thing which worries me is, if I start doing tangible interaction have I left HCI research?

( must work on CHI papers , must work on CHI paper )