Real HCI: what it takes to do HCI engineering for disasters, driving, disruption, and distributed work

The current dependence of HCI practice on feature-level design and defect-oriented usability evaluation is hindering it from addressing persistent societal problems such as disaster search and rescue, driver distraction and communication failures. HCI has much to offer here in helping apply information technologies in effective, usable ways. But a fundamental issue in solving these persistent problems is ensuring that steady progress is made, and HCI can play a role here too, by characterizing the task, helping define the metrics for progress, providing the interfaces on which progress hinges, and assessing the likely effect of design choices. These cases can benefit from taking an engineering approach and from using HCI as a part of that activity. Speakers will present cases that involve variations on this theme. Their presentations will provide a basis for a lively discussion of HCI's potential to make an impact on social problems in the future and the methods effective in realizing this potential.