- What was the most valuable thing you learned while in the Cognitive Science department at UCSD?
Before I try to answer that,
let me explain that when I was at UCSD (1977-82)
there was no Cognitive Science department.
Cognitive Science was just starting as a field in the late 1970s.
I was in the psychology department for most of my time,
advised by Dave Rumelhart,
and computer science for a year.
Maybe the most valuable thing I learned at UCSD was that
for what I wanted to do, which was at the intersection of
many fields, it did not matter that much what department I was in.
UCSD was an interdisciplinary place even then,
and although I might have wanted to spend various percentages of my time
in different disciplines, those percentages were not as important
as having access to people in the disciplines.
Even before there was a Cognitive Science department,
my funding by the Canadian Government
(what is now the
Natural Science and Engineering Research Council)
gave me the flexibility to explore my interests in other departments.
I learned that when what I wanted to know was not readily available,
it was still available.
- What advice would you give to current students?
As my undergraduate advisor at the University of Rochester, David A. Taylor,
advised me when I was deciding among grad schools,
"Anyone who gives up the chance to live in San Diego for a few years is an idiot!'
or something along those lines.
Besides the weather and the beach, there's the desert, the mountains,
Los Angeles, northern California, Mexico, and a dozen great national parks
within a one-day drive (that's one day on a grad student's stamina, mind you).
My advice is to enjoy all that with fellow grad students, family and friends.
I don't think I will ever find a group of people I was
more comfortable with and with whom I can pick up any time, any place,
because we have so much shared experience.
My transcript from UCSD is remarkable if only for its length.
Starting my third year, I signed up for three phys-ed classes each term:
tennis, volleyball, and dance. Time well spent, I think,
although I wish that my shoulder had held up better.
- How did your education at UCSD train you for what you are doing today?
I spent a lot of my time at UCSD developing skills in empirical science,
computer science, and mathematics. Those have clear uses in what I do now.
I also worked to improve my writing, mostly by writing,
and aided greatly by Don Norman's editing flair.
Sometimes he handed back a page that looked like a bloodbath of red ink,
but other times it was just a light ogive through an entire page (or two, or five).
As a professor, I used a different tact. I used green.
- What do you feel is the most rewarding aspect of your job?
I have had four jobs since getting my Ph.D. at UCSD.
(1) I went to Bell Labs where in just two years I was overwhelmed by corporate life
(to the extent BTL had what people would call corporate life) during the breakup of AT&T.
There was nothing rewarding of that job except that it placed me
where I would meet my wife,
Caroline Palmer.
(2) I taught software engineering to experienced hand-selected masters students in the Boston area,
and (3) I was also a professor in computer science at Ohio State,
where I saw a much broader range of students.
I enjoyed teaching and advising students immensely.
I have always liked doing things that are useful to others, the more people the better.
For me, this has often taken the form of creating software and services
that get used by a lot of people.
After a few years splitting my time between academia and consulting,
(4) I took a position at my favorite place to consult,
OCLC,
where I get to help libraries around the world make their services more useful to their patrons.
- How did you first get involved in human-computer interaction/user interface design,
and what do you do with it now?
It all started at UCSD with the statistical packages we used for data analysis.
They were completely unusable.
The way that people had to specify the format of their data and the
analyses that were wanted was a prescription for error.
Also, during my year in computer science,
sometimes I felt like the notation used was designed to confuse people.
The awful stat packages and the lack of a package on our lab's computer
motivated me to write
my own stat package
that is still widely used three decades later.
The awful notation examples motivated me to write a
short opinion piece on more meaningful notation
for a mathematics education journal,
which was the informal basis for my dissertation
(Natural Artificial Languages).
All this was in the context of intimate "design group" meetings in Don Norman's office,
perhaps the most inspirational meetings I ever attended.
Since then, I have been an educator, researcher, and developer with a focus on HCI.
Although I do not do many controlled experiments these days,
the empirical aspects of my background are always present.
I am always gathering data to understand what's going on and help make decisions.
I work primarily on information retrieval systems for libraries and their patrons,
and OCLC, as the world's largest library cooperative, is a great place to
make my work have the most leverage.
- In what way (if any) do you feel your training in Cognitive Science gave you an advantage in your field, as opposed to one of the more traditional disciplines, like Computer Science?
At the core of Cognitive Science is multidisciplinarianism.
Just being able to communicate with people with different backgrounds
has tended to put me into the center of many projects
instead of the periphery.
Part of that has been the ability to take different viewpoints on problems:
usability, performance, maintainability, and so on.
So I work on analysis, design, coding, and testing (both functional and usability).
Growing up in Montreal, I speak French (not well, mind you, but that's another story).
I know that word order, gender and number agreements, and so on, vary across languages.
At OCLC, by virtue of my knowledge of French,
I am considered an expert in translating user interfaces.
(It may have helped that I helped create
OCLC's first multilingual system.)
Similarly, someone with a Cognitive Science background would be
the expert linguist or psychologist among computer scientists,
or the expert computer scientist among linguists or psychologists,
or the ethnographer to all of the above.
If you can bring a new dimension to a team,
you add a lot more than one more worker like all the others.
Cognitive scientists have many dimensions.
- In the course of your career, what has most surprised or excited you within your field?
I have always been surprised at how difficult it is to apply the psychological literature
to practical problems of design. That's been more depressing that exciting, though.
I have also been surprised by how bad user interfaces can be,
even after so many years of shared experience, especially on the web.
I am excited to have such employment security.
- What is the most challenging aspect of your job and/or career?
Gaining consensus is always challenging, but often the most rewarding.
- How do you maintain a balance between your work and the rest of your life?
Oh, that's easy to answer!
I focus on the rest of my life.
You know the expression
"No one on their deathbed ever said they wished they had spent more time at the office."
But I have some data to bear on the issue of the significance of one's life's work.
In 1988 or so, I decided to create
The HCI Bibliography,
which has about 40,000 records of publications in a
searchable database
that handles about a million searches a year (mostly by robots, mind you).
If I look at a
list of the most published authors in HCI
(not all HCI work is represented in the bibliography, of course),
I am struck by the disparity of the number of researchers (tens of thousands)
and the number whose work has been influential (by whatever measure you like).
My conclusion?
I matter a lot more to my family and friends than I will ever matter to my work.
- If you could choose another profession to be in, what would it be?
Maybe a lawyer. My compulsive need to organize information would be useful there.