The latest edition of the ACM Interactions magazine http://interactions.acm.org/ includes an article by Vassilis Kostakos (@vkostakos http://www.ee.oulu.fi/~vassilis/ ) titled The Big Hole in HCI Research in which he comments on an article that he and colleagues published at CHI2014. Their paper CHI 1994–2013: Mapping two decades of intellectual progress through co-word analysis. describes the research that has been published at the ACM CHI conference over the previous twenty years. Through co-word analysis, they demonstrate a lack of motor themes in the research that is published at CHI. “Motor themes are the heart and soul of a discipline, its main topics or schools of thought. Surprisingly, we found that, unlike other disciplines, CHI has consistently lacked motor themes.” Kostakos argues that without motor themes one has to wonder whether CHI is a scientific conference at all. He echoes the points we have made previously about the dangers of focusing on implications for design, rather than valuing implications for theory.
Vassilis Kostakos. 2015. The big hole in HCI research. interactions 22, 2 (February 2015), 48-51. DOI=10.1145/2729103 http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2729103
Liu, Y., Goncalves, J., Ferreira, D., Xiao, B., et al. CHI 1994–2013: Mapping two decades of intellectual progress through co-word analysis. Proc. CHI 2014. ACM, New York, 2014, 3553–3562.
