Required Reading List (Summer 2019)

This class has two reading lists: a list of required readings, and a list of recommended readings. The required readings will be useful to your assignments and projects, and will also be tested more explicitly on the two course tests. The recommended readings are more generally foundational books, papers, and courses on HCI in general.

Required Reading List

On average, you can expect to spend 1 to 2 hours reading per week. The topics of these papers fall into three categories: some are thorough, retrospective overviews of decades of HCI research; some are foundational, seminal works in the field of HCI; and some are cutting-edge research from the most recent HCI-related conferences and journals.

The information contained in these readings will be useful as you complete your assignments and projects, but it will also be tested explicitly on the course tests. Ten questions on each test will be based on these readings. From the perspective of the test, your emphasis in reading these papers should be in getting a sufficient understanding of the material to answer high-level questions about the paper, as well as to be able to find answers quickly for more specific questions.

Note that the weeks in this list represent the week of content most relevant to the listed readings. However, we know that there will be weeks when you are busier than others, and you may not be able to complete a week’s readings during that particular week. The only assessments dependent on having completed these readings are the tests, so you need only worry about completing the readings for weeks 1 through 5 by week 5, and for weeks 6 through 10 by week 10.

To accommodate the shorter summer schedule, we have distributed the readings typically completed in weeks 11 and 12 throughout the second half of the class. Readings marked with (CHI) come from week 11’s “Best of CHI 2017 and 2018” theme. Readings marked with (GT) come from week 12’s “Best of Georgia Tech HCI” theme.

Week 1: Foundations of HCI
  • MacKenzie, I.S. (2013). Chapter 1: Historical Context. Human-Computer Interaction: An Empirical Research Perspective. (pp. 1-26). Waltham, MA: Elsevier.
  • Norman, D. (2013). Chapter 1: The Psychopathology of Everyday Things. In The Design of Everyday Things: Revised and Expanded Edition. (pp. 1-36). Arizona: Basic Books.
  • Norman, D. A. (1986). Cognitive engineering. In D. A. Norman & S. W. Draper (Eds.) User-Centered System Design: New Perspectives on Human-Computer Interaction. (pp. 32-61). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Week 2: Research Ethics and Needfinding
  • MacKenzie, I.S. (2013). Chapter 4: Scientific Foundations. Human-Computer Interaction: An Empirical Research Perspective. (pp. 121-152). Waltham, MA: Elsevier.
  • Müller, H., Sedley, A., & Ferrall-Nunge, E. (2014). Survey research in HCI. In J. Olson & W. Kellogg (Eds.) Ways of Knowing in HCI (pp. 229-266). New York: Springer.
Week 3: Invisible Interfaces and Human Abilities
Week 4: Design Alternatives
Week 5: Mental Models and Representations
END OF MATERIAL FOR TEST 1
Week 6: Prototyping
Week 7: Context and Distributed Cognition
Week 8: Experiments and Evaluation
Week 9: Artifacts, Interfaces, and Politics
Week 10: Evaluation and Agile Development
END OF MATERIAL FOR TEST 2

Recommended Reading List

HCI is a huge field, and there’s always more to read; in addition to the required papers and chapters above, there are also several books, other papers, and other courses online that we recommend checking out. None of these are tested explicitly in any work required for the class, but they would certainly benefit both your work here as well as your future pursuits.

Books

The following books are seminal HCI literature and could be read in parallel to any course material.

Papers

In addition to these books, there are several excellent readings that complement specific lessons or concepts from HCI. Many of these papers will be discussed during those lessons, but we have also provided a list of recommended papers and their corresponding lessons and topics. Where available, links go to the paper; if a link is not available, you should be able to locate the paper through the Georgia Tech library or, if noted, the Files folder on Canvas.

Courses

There are also a number of high-quality courses offered by other instructors and institutions that may be of interest to further developing your knowledge of HCI.