Reflections on Interdisciplinarity following NordiCHI 2022

Oct 14, 2022

This week I attended NordiCHI in Aarhus, my first in-person conference in human-computer interaction (HCI). I found it very interesting to see how this research community approaches similar questions from different perspectives, and want to make use of some of my observations there to reflect upon interdisciplinarity in this blog post.

Very generally, I believe that disciplinary boundaries are there to be overcome. There are surely historical, political, institutional and research-tradition-related reasons for disciplines to be and remain separate from each other. However, when looking at specific phenomena, I believe that a plurality of perspectives can only be beneficial, if only to surface contradictions, tensions, or differences of opinions.

As an anthropologist who is also a computer scientist in-the-making, I very much enjoy discussing topics from multiple perspectives. Observing just that as a scientific practice throughout the conference was very inspiring. However, it does not come without challenges. With people coming from a variety of disciplines, their contributions are based on differing assumptions of what researchers should do, and how they should do it.

Particularly the keynote by Kasper Hornbæk on the role of theory in HCI was very inspiring. As an anthropologist, I cannot imagine doing academic work without theory. There are many goals I have for my PhD project, but a very important one is the contribution to theory I plan to provide. My dissertation will be all about applying and combining theories to fit the empirical ethnographic insights I gained through research. By doing that, I intend to both shed light on my insights through theory, but also engage the theory by putting it in dialogue with a specific empirical context.

As I learnt during the conference, some of the other disciplines represented in HCI are not so much about engaging theory, but rather about building prototypes and putting them to a test in order to try to solve pre-identified “real-world” problems. In some cases, I wondered whether the prototypes were really addressing the underlying, structural issues or just providing short-lived band-aid solutions. However, the outcome of these research projects are products intended to help improve people’s lives in tangible ways – to what extent can we say the same about the books we produce in anthropology and adjacent disciplines?

One of the main points of Kasper Hornbæk’s keynote was that HCI would benefit from engaging more with theory. But isn’t it a lot to ask from people who focus on building and improving prototypes to also contribute to theory? And what would that, in turn, mean for disciplines that work intensely on theory – would anthropologists also be required to design prototypes that are meant to solve some of the issues we encounter? And what would they look like?