Last changed
10 Jan 1998 ............... Length about 900 words (6000 bytes).
This is a WWW document by Steve Draper, installed at http://www.psy.gla.ac.uk/~steve/talks/whyfund.html.
You may copy it. How to refer to it.
(Back
up to central page on the debate)
Why should taxpayers fund HCI research?
There will be a
GIST debate on Thur 18 Dec. 1997,
4pm, conference room, 17 Lilybank Gardens.
(How to get there.)
Afterwards we are invited for drinks and snacks at
Chris Johnson's home.
The result
is shown here.
The debate is on "Why should taxpayers fund HCI research?", and will be
attended by anyone who wants, including
Nigel Birch from
EPSRC (he chaired a panel on this at HCI'97), and
Anne Anderson who is director of the
ESRC
cognitive engineering research programme.
(They have both indicated they plan to attend.)
It's important because we are being asked to justify funding, and so far I
think we are all rubbish at it. I think we can justify it, but we haven't had
the practice and need to work at it. If we don't do it, why should anyone
else? If there is no justification, why should we get any money?
Provisional debate plan
- (You will of course have read my
my piece in advance.)
- Michelle Montgomery "Why HCI should be funded".
- Nigel Birch: two negative remarks that need rebutting
- Chris Johnson: why HCI is always playing catchup
- Mark Dunlop: why HCI is a waste of time when Microsoft sets the industry
standard
- Adrian Williamson on how it's worth the money just to get real
interdisciplinarity going: bringing socio- and psycho- studies to technology
will avoid repeating the big IT design failures of the past.
- Paddy O'Donnell: a 5 minute review of the literature on funding research
Bring along rebuttals of negative arguments, and brand new reasons to fund HCI.
Web documents on this
Steve Draper