[CalmLogic]

BTW, for the record, another perspective on the HCI program at ISU:

We have a relatively new “virtual” department at Iowa State University (ISU) called Human Computer Interaction (HCI). What I mean by virtual department is, that in order to get a degree in HCI you must co-major in it and first have a home department. Also, most of the HCI faculty also have home departments somewhere else.

...I was first introduced to it by my advisor in the statistics department who is an HCI faculty member.

I was immediately interested in the field because there is a ton of statistics that goes into determining how successful the programs are, as well as the statistics that are incorporated into research in any field. One of the reason I like statistics so much is that it is applicable to any subject. Having unending interests in many different fields this appealed to me greatly. I soon decided that no matter what I got my PhD in, HCI would be part of it.

That was when I started asking around (I had many friends who were computer science majors). I soon found out that depending on who you asked, ISU either had a great or a horrible HCI department. This confused me because I was under the assumption, as I stated before, that the definition of HCI was the same across the board. After that I did a little asking around and searching on the internet and came up with a little more clarifying information.

At ISU we have a world renowned virtual reality lab (VRAC) and that is the driving force behind our HCI department.

Math Stats And Data Mining » Blog Archive » What does Human Computer Interaction really mean?