ICAT Playdate — Interdisciplinarity in HCI: What happened in our big tent?

It isn't surprising that Human Computer Interaction (HCI) is an interdisciplinary area. Understanding and engineering meaningful interactions between human and computers requires leveraging and integrating lots of different knowledge about humans and about computing. But it was never a given that HCI would adopt and pursue a particularly ambitious conception of interdisciplinarity as a core value and practice. Indeed, especially in the 1980s and 1990s, this was an intentional and cultivated achievement. However, in specific ways, one could argue that interdisciplinarity is trending down in HCI. But why? In this talk, I examine aspects of interdisciplinarity in HCI, including both achievements and challenges. I think more interdisciplinarity is better, and that we can only achieve it deliberately.