Germany: The Wunderkind of HCI?
Three weeks ago I started working at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics in Saarbrücken, Germany, with the goal of establishing their first group on HCI. After just three weeks, my understanding of the German HCI scene is still limited, but I wanted to share my first impression.
In 2006, I was a research intern at Deutsche Telekom's newly established T-Labs in Berlin, located in flashy premises in a central location in western Berlin. At that time, which is just five years ago, it was clear that Germany was taking it's baby steps in HCI. There were only a handful of groups and most of them not appear very well funded. The HCI researchers I talked to seemed to have low self-esteem, complaining that HCI is not viewed as "proper science" and they had to fight prejudice in the host departments and funding organizations. Actually, the most promising Germans doing HCI had fled the country. And, if the number of CHI papers is a valid measure of anything, I believe that in the first half of the 2000s even Finland dwarfed Germany. Starting in my new work three weeks ago, I was glad to find myself in a changed country. My former employer T-Labs has become one of the front-runners of German HCI, among with Hasso Plattner Institute, LMU, RTWH Aachen, Duisburg-Essen, and DFKI. These and other German groups are active and well-known in all top conferences. These groups even compete which gets most CHI papers [1]. My sense is that the then toxic atmosphere has changed as well, from prejudice to tolerance, and is now changing to embracement. New HCI professors have started throughout the country. And some top people who fled the country, like Patrick Baudisch, have returned. There are even serious plans to get the CHI conference to Berlin. Achieving all this in just five years makes Germany the Wunderkind of HCI. However, the most promising aspect is that Germans are now investing into HCI, and at scales most others can dream of. In Finland, for instance, there is no Center of Excellence focusing on HCI, which is the flagship of academic funding in Finland. And even if there was, it would get funding in the order of 1M€/year. Compare this to the German Clusters of Excellence. The Multimodal Computing and Interaction Cluster of Excellence [2], located in Saarbrücken, enjoys funding in the order of 40M€! This money is used to establish 20 (!) new research groups. I see two shadows dimming the child prodigy's path to glory. First, research groups are not very multi-disciplinary. Most groups are located within computer science departments and driven by computer scientists or engineers. This is fine--there's a lot of good HCI work that can be done by computer scientists. But will this become a limiting factor? After all, many of the most successful groups in HCI's past have included also behavioral and social scientists. Second, the HCI curricula in German universities are not very comprehensive. I believe that a modern Master's program in HCI should involve a combination of HCI's"classic" elements, such as human factors and prototyping, as well as more timely elements, such as multimodal user interfaces and video games. Obviously many combinations are valid, but what worries me is that German curricula typically cover the classic bit by just 1-2 courses. Without the classic elements will the students have transferable skills that help them address novel problems outside the spezialization? (Update: There's at least one HCI-specific Master's program, at Uni Siegen.) In my view, these issues are structural and can undermine any amount of euros pumped into HCI research. Solving the issue boils down to one critical question about "Germany's HCI identity": what is it that German HCI research can do better than others? I'll keep you posted on what I learn. Links:[1] http://hci.rwth-aachen.de/chi-ranking
[2] http://www.mmci.uni-saarland.de/
