The Lived Informatics Model

Kyle Polich (0:06)

Welcome to the new season of Data Skeptic. It's Human-Computer Interaction, or HCI.

Human-Computer Interaction is an interdisciplinary field. Studies how people design, use, and experience computing technology. It's been with the field all along, especially since the personal computer revolution. After all, there was a first keyboard, a first mouse, a first user interface. All of those tools are crafted to give the average user access to some aspect of a computer. Early on and even still, we ask questions about basic low-level perception and motor performance. Have you ever used a mouse where you thought the speed was too fast or too slow? I sure have. Today, the field also asks high-level questions about how technology shapes collaboration, privacy, even well-being. The field is known for methods such as user-centered design, usability testing, ethnographic fieldwork, controlled experiments, iterative prototyping, and the list of ideas and methods goes on and on. We're going to talk about those concepts and things like user interfaces and design principles. And how could I not get into things like VR, audio interfaces, and motion systems?

Today, HCI spans a wide range of areas, and both the design and the live phase of them are definitely interacting more and more with AI systems. There's tons of topics and nooks and crannies within HCI to cover, so I'm really excited to be kicking this off. I've already interviewed someone doing some really cool stuff in robotics, in audio interfaces, and philosophy of user interface design. This is the fun time when I'm really into research mode. There's a lot to cover in HCI, and it's really perfect for Data Skeptic, not just because of the wealth of good research out there, but because of how data-driven most of it is at its core. So I hope everyone enjoyed Recommender Systems and that you'll equally find HCI is worth your earbuds. And if you like what we're doing, please tell a friend or two about Data Skeptic. All right, let's get started.

Welcome to Data Skeptic Human-Computer Interaction. Today, I'm speaking with Daniel Epstein, an associate professor in the Department of Informatics at UC Irvine. Our focus is on self-tracking, and his lived informatics model, which reframed the field once Fitbits and Apple Watches and those sorts of things went mainstream, were long past the qualified self-biohackers days and into a serious research area.

I've tried a variety of trackers in my lifetime, and I haven't stuck with all of them, but some I have for quite a big stretch. Let's get into all of that and more right after this.

Daniel Epstein (3:05)

I'm Daniel Epstein. I'm an associate professor in the Department of Informatics at the University of California, Irvine. I also have a courtesy appointment in the Department of Computer Science.

Kyle Polich (3:16)

For people not familiar with the area, could you give a broad definition of what informatics covers?

Daniel Epstein (3:21)

Informatics is, we commonly refer to it as the discipline that you've heard about, but you never actually heard defined. Broadly speaking, it covers people's everyday interactions with technology. So technology design, the increasing role that technology is playing in society, positive and negative, and understanding and interrogating, and hopefully designing and improving technology's role in life moving forward.

Kyle Polich (3:52)

And in terms of scholarship in the field, I doubt if you have proofs or anything quite exactly like that, what kind of research goes on?

Daniel Epstein (4:00)

So not big into proofs or formal math or anything like that. We tend to do a lot of design work, so the discipline largely draws on, well, informatics at a high level draws on a number of different disciplines. But specifically, I focus a lot on human computer interaction, which is on the design and development of technology that's useful for people. So a lot of interview methods, but also some prototyping and ultimately building systems and evaluating them as well.

Kyle Polich (4:33)

So at what point in your career do you first get interested in human computer interaction?

Daniel Epstein (4:39)

So I like to say that I'm a reformed computer scientist. All of my degrees prior to being in a department of informatics are from computer science or computer science and engineering departments.

And while I was in the minds of writing proofs and writing code, I found myself missing the human needs, feeling like I was building all these things, and kind of missing out on the bigger question of why, or is this the right thing to be building? Are people going to find this useful, that sort of thing? So I started out in a class in my undergrad, and then that kind of pushed me into research, and then in the PhD is really where I made the full transition over to being an HCI researcher.