HCI education in Sweden

HCI is still a rather new subject for Scandinavian undergraduate level studies. Ten years ago only short courses at var-O ious computer science • ~ and system development educations were available. During the last two-three years HCI education has grown rather rapidly through the establishment of minor programs at the smaller universities and with specific profiles at the bigger universities. In 1998 the first Ph.D. in HCI graduated and now an HMI graduate school has been started in Link6ping and Stock-holm. HCI has also been well established as a research activity in Swe-den and is now becoming more and more regular departments at the major universities. Still, education in HCI is varied in content and direction, and this paper describes a first Swedish workshop aimed at reviewing the contents of HCI courses in Sweden. The workshop was initiated through a session where everybody was asked about their expectation on the workshop in the forms of relevant questions to discuss. The initial questions and discussion topics were, in order of appearance: 1. How do you create a balance between redesigning existing arti-facts and promoting new and creative solutions? 2. Exchange experiences concerning different pedagogical approaches to HCI 3. New ways of examining HCI courses 4. What should a basic HCI course contain? 5. What should advanced HCI courses contain? 6. What basic knowledge should we require? 7. How can we introduce practical tasks into a HCI course? Without it taking too much of the time? Using simple and realistic prob-lems? 8. How do you create motivation for the students to take HCI as a secondary subject? 9. Practical issues How do we teach innovation? How do we teach creativity? 10.What can we learn from the game industry? We did not go through the questions in detail but touched upon most of them in the discussion that followed. Through a brainstorming session we attempted to condense a set of what we considered to be typical knowledge that a basic course on HCI should present. We performed an informal survey in which the workshop participants were to choose the five most important subjects and the summary of the votes went as shown in Table 1. The course should comprise 5 points (where 1 point corresponds to approximately one week of work). The number of subjects turned out to be rather limited. This informal survey indicates that cognitive psychology, design princi-ples/processes, interaction techniques, usability, …