HCI EDUCATION AND PRACTICE

HCI education is not yet as well developed in Japan as it is in the United States. While the JTEC panel did not obtain quantitative information, several important points became quite obvious from discussions with the panel's Japanese hosts:

University education in HCI in Japan lags that of the United States by perhaps 5-10 years. The number of HCI courses and HCI students at Japanese universities is lower than in United States, and the discipline of HCI is not as well established in Japanese universities, although this is changing.

• Cognitive science is not as well developed in Japan as in the United States.
• Japanese universities have very little interdisciplinary HCI teaching and research of the type found at a number of U.S. schools, typically involving teams of faculty from departments such as Computer Science, Industrial Engineering, Information Design, Management, Psychology, and Sociology. This is in part due to greater compartmentalization in universities, and, presumably, to the risk aversion mentioned in the preceding section. HCI, even in the United States, is still looked at suspiciously in some departments. It has not been championed here by risk-averse individuals. Whatever the reasons, the lack of interactions between faculty from different disciplines hurts HCI education, which is inherently multidisciplinary.
• One measure of the acceptance of HCI into mainstream computer science in the United States is that the department chairs of two substantial computer science departments are psychologists whose research is HCI. A similar level of acceptance does not yet exist in Japan.
• In terms of the application of HCI principles and methodologies to the design of interactive computer systems, the JTEC panel found that
  • Most companies that the panel visited recognized the importance of HCI and understood the value of including both technological and behavioral sciences expertise in design teams. On the other hand, few of the companies seemed to be doing it, at least not on the scale of many U.S. companies. The reason often given for this was the shortage of trained HCI professionals.
  • Most companies are using some form of methodological HCI design process.
  • Usability labs are much less prominent in companies in Japan than in the United States.