themusicgod1's Journal: Human Computer Interaction (HCI) is Pseudoscience

HCI is pseudoscience. Or at least, the stuff that my prof is teaching is pseudoscience. Now, maybe the field of HCI is scientific, and I'm being taught wrong, but it is becoming clearer and clearer as I progress through this field that it is not a science. In fact, the very first sentence of the textbook makes the claim that the field is Not a science, (nor an art, nor does it contain yet the discipline engineering).

Let's see.. At first, I was just kind of unhappy that this course had managed to get 'Computer Science' attributed to it. But it's deeper than that; since there is no objective standards in the field, research into it seem doomed to purely subjective, and inaccurate results. That being said, of all the non-scientific fields to go in, helping people work with computers better is certainly not the worst to go into; but for SERVER's sake, get with the 18th century and join the scientific revolution, or at least drop the pretense that this has anything to do with computer science.

• the beginning of the course started with a 'there are no facts in this course, no objective truth.' That ought to be a good hint but I refused to believe what I saw.

This list will grow as I think of things. Too bad comments are shut down early. It's kind of sad, in a way. HCI finds gnu/linux, and free software in general very praiseworthy as a thing to spend time doing. Perhaps one of the five-ish pillars of my belief in free software is HCI based; but that pillar has essentially been toppled. Thankfully the others are on much firmer ground.