Please join the Department of Human Centered Design & Engineering (HCDE) in Autumn Quarter for a 10-week seminar on current topics in the field by HCDE faculty. Each 40-minute talk will be followed by a Q&A session. Members of the UW community and the public are welcome. More information about the series is available online at hcde.uw.edu/521.
Title: Macro and Micro HCDE: Are We Evolving Into a Two-Level Field? Should We?
Date: October 17, 2012
Speaker: Mark Haselkorn, HCDE Professor
When: Wednesdays, 5:00-5:50 PM
Where: Mary Gates Hall, Room 241, UW Seattle campus
As the young field of HCDE evolves, it is going beyond its early emphasis on “analyz[ing] and design[ing] user interfaces and new user-interface technologies.” (Carroll 2003). As a leader in HCDE, our department says we now are “using innovative techniques to study human activity and then translating that knowledge into meaningful information and system designs.” Are we evolving towards a two-level field, one which focuses on human centered design of interface features and interactions; the other which focuses on human centered design of complex systems involving numerous and evolving elements such as diverse roles, multiple missions, organizational structures, big data, policies, infrastructures, difficult environments, and information and communication technologies? Is this an important distinction for the future of HCDE? This talk explores these questions by looking at what we can learn from other fields, from theoretical approaches, and from current examples such as the Federal government’s attempt to “require User Centered Design to have been applied” to Electronic Health Record technology. (DHHS, 45 CFR 170). It concludes that not only are we evolving towards this two-level field, but that, like Macro and Micro Economics, it is necessary and important to do both and to recognize the relationships between the two.
Instructor: Professor Jan Spyridakis
1 Credit (Credit/Non-credit)
Registration for UW students is available by entry code; contact the HCDE advisor by emailing hcde@uw.edu.
About the Speaker
Mark Haselkorn is a Professor in the Department of Human Centered Design & Engineering. Haselkorn leads University of Washington (UW) partnerships in the National Center for Cognitive Informatics and Decision Making in Healthcare, funded by the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, as well as the DHS-funded Center of Excellence on Visual Analytics for Command, Control and Interoperability Environments. He is Director of the Pacific Rim Visualization and Analytics Center, which has the mission of advancing visual analytics for the enhancement of distributed, collaborative cognition and decision-making for public safety and security. He also founded and directs the UW’s Interdisciplinary Program on Humanitarian Relief, a cross-campus program of research and education that works with the international humanitarian sector to improve logistics and service systems. In this area, one of Haselkorn’s current PhD students, Robin Mays, has received a three-year National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowship (2012–2015).