Category: hci research

• On the Amazon Echo

  Note: This is an old post that I guess I never published. Hence the 2016 Labor Day reference.   Over labor day weekend (2016) I had some trouble with Alexa. But that’s all I know. I don’t know anything about the cause or anything about possible solutions. Here’s what happened. On Sunday morning I asked Alexa…

  jordanbeck

  March 2, 2017

• Adolescence as a Metaphor for HCI

  Early in the book HCI Theory, Yvonne Rogers takes a few pages to establish that research in the field is rapidly expanding/diversifying and that it’s difficult to pin down just what kind of field HCI is and what kind of research academics who identify as “HCI researchers” do. Somewhere in those first few pages, she…

  jordanbeck

  January 18, 2017

• About The Theory-Practice Gap

  How is it that we distinguish between theorists and practitioners?

  jordanbeck

  December 23, 2016

• The Problem of Problem-setting

  One of the more interesting and recent questions I’ve been thinking about has to do with the theory-practice gap in HCI research. Now, I have very little interest at the moment in bridging the gap. And really there are plenty of folks in the field working on this problem. I’m more interested in the theory-practice…

  jordanbeck

  December 2, 2016

• Bridging Theory and Practice

  Just as there are lots of discussions and debates about theory building in HCI, there are also some interesting contributions to the discipline that address the theory-practice gap. In a previous post I wrote about how important it is to think about what words mean for intellectual progress (or just for clarity of communication) in the…

  jordanbeck

  August 11, 2016

• Theoretical Adequacy in HCI Research

  Theoretical adequacy is an concept that comes up in some form or another in various readings in the hci literature. More often than not, authors express concern that hci is currently (or soon-to-be) theoretically inadequate. But what does this mean? What is theoretical adequacy? Is it the degree to which knowledge produced and published in a discipline is adopted…

  jordanbeck

  August 10, 2016

• what should theory mean?

  I’ve been collecting (and modifying and losing) thoughts about theory and the different ways it has been discussed and debated in academia for some time now. Recently I started organizing a collection of readings on/about theory according to different concepts like: theory development, theory-practice relationship, theory-artifact relationship, etc. What’s really striking about all these readings…

  jordanbeck

  August 8, 2016

• The Theory Project

  I’ve added some new pages — well one new page and a few revised page names — to the site! I’m really excited about the new page: the theory project. It is one of the outcomes of a research project that I’ve been involved in for the past couple years examining theory from various aspects.…

  jordanbeck

  July 14, 2016

• Theory and Theory Building

  I’ve been puttering my way through a lengthy reading list I put together toward the end of the summer. Gathering the list is one of the things I did to fulfill the requirements of my PhD qualifying exam. The other requirements: writing a paper and presenting/defending the content of the paper to my advisory committee. Anyway, the…

  jordanbeck

  December 7, 2015

• the future of hci research

  My PhD advisor, Erik Stolterman, recently penned a blog post called hci research and the problems with the scientific method. It’s a good post and you should read it. It was motivated by a New Yorker article written a few years ago about the ‘decline effect’ in science, which refers to the phenomenon wherein at-first positive…

  jordanbeck

  June 26, 2015