#TECHTUESDAY: Victor Cheung on Human-Computer Interaction

Story

Our School of Computing Science was having its 50th anniversary in 2023 and one of the things they did was to create a series of interviews with their faculty members on interesting CS topics.

I was asked to give a short description on what I’m interested in and I decided to talk about Human-Computer Interaction. It was also the time when I was teaching a course in Sci-Fi & HCI and so I did my little speech around that idea.

While watching that video, don’t forget to watch the others in the playlist!

Reflection

This interview summarizes what I’m mostly interested in the recent years: emerging technologies and how to design them so that people can learn and use them with ease and confidently. In many cases technologies are released to the public so fast (and many companies simply follow suit) that not much thought is put on how people are going to use them and what are they used for. A few examples are Apple’s Newton, Google’s Glasses, and Nintendo’s Virtual Boy – these are impressive technologies but failed because of lack of applications and/or acceptance from the public.

Many opportunities are lost (or bigger problems being created) because technologies are released not “because we should” but “because we can”. Ultimately technologies are supposed to help us to improve quality of life, and to be able to determine that one must take the human-centered approach – first understand the needs, capabilities, limitations, and preferences of the human users, then design and create technologies that address those.

Recommended citation: SFU School of Computing Science. (2023, September). #TECHTUESDAY: Victor Cheung on Human-Computer Interaction [Video]. YouTube.
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