Final thoughts on Munich IRES Internship

Unsurprisingly, a significant component of Human-Computer Interaction involves an intrinsic human element that is inherently difficult to quantify. It pertains not only to how people interact with computing as consumer-level technology continues to grow in utility and pervasiveness, but also in how people interact between each other, in turn informing expectations as to how they interact with technology. To that end, Human-Computer Interaction also heavily consists of Computer-Computer Interaction and, most importantly, Human-Human interaction. It is no surprise that psychology has been molding into and significantly influencing HCI research in the past decades and will only become more relevant in the decades to come. 

At the base of this is a need to understand culture, how people build their worldview and under which environments they built it. The concept of the ethnography, specifically as it relates to understanding demographics for which your computing solutions are targeted, was created for this very purpose. It is not enough to build a software application for the elderly if the author of the software never interacted with the elderly or obtained first-hand experience with their daily lives. It is not enough to build a software application for automated driving without understanding traffic laws and which cultural norms and expectations informed said regulations. It is not enough to build an "intuitive" UI/UX without knowing any expectations constructed by society that influence what each person considers "intuitive". And by the same token, it is not enough to be a researcher in Human-Computer Interaction and build solutions meant to be used by people around the world if one does not spend any time in foreign cultures to understand how people would use these solutions.

I do not consider visits to foreign labs beneficial to my training as an HCI researcher. I consider it essential. Even on a narrower perspective, different labs focus on different technologies, place emphasis on different aspects of research, are informed by different past experiences, and generally flow in different directions depending on the backgrounds of all faculty involved in said labs. On a wider sense, immersion in a different country provides vital perspective into cultures and expectations that would otherwise not exist. Education in HCI research involves far more than simply learning how to code or how to write a paper. It even goes beyond knowing how to identify productivity in research projects and collaborating via conference calls. It is for the same reason why the Computer Science field heavily favors conferences to disseminate information; in-person, on-site, human-human interactions are irreplaceable not only in a person but also a professional setting. Significant time abroad is only an extension of that.

For that reason I consider these opportunities to be critical to my development as an HCI researcher, and look forward to continuing similar opportunities in the future.