Ben Shneiderman lecture

Ben Shneiderman's lecture was extremely interesting. He emphasized creativity and talked in depth about the creative class and of tools that could spur evoluton in thought process. His exact quote regarding creative tools from the lecture was "More people More Creative More of the time"- which he tried to achieve through a variety of mechnaisms including, for example, completely original visualization schemes for different tasks. An extremely insightful part to the lecture was when he revealed science 2.0 which in essence (from my understanding) tries to further the idea of science by stating that valuable results can also be the byproduct of not so controlled experiments. His essential problem was that science 2.0, which lends itself readily to HCI studies, is not highly regarded in Journals and Publications. This lack of information proliferation through journals is a fundamental problem that needs to be rememdied somehow in HCI research. There were a few professors who, even in the talk itself, stood opposed to the idea of science 2.0 (or believed that it wasn't fully hashed out or complete). In the end I think Shneiderman's essential point of the necessity to have a mechanism for information dissemination given the current prejudices of Journals and the nature of HCI studies was completely valid; whether any change will actually occur and at what pace remains to be seen.

Last modified 13 November 2007 at 1:16 pm by Ashok.Basawapatna