The last decade has seen incredible leaps and bounds in the world of computing: 3D printers that can print other 3D printers, virtual and augmented reality applications can whisk a user away to new worlds, and voice-controlled devices can tell give you details about the weather and traffic.
Daniela Rus, Professor and Director of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), not only is a promoter of HCI, but believes wholeheartedly in its pivotal role in shaping our future. As she says; “Future human-computer interactions will make it much easier for people and machines to work together. It will make it possible for machines to support people in cognitive tasks as well as physical tasks. The future holds a lot of possibilities for people and machines working together.”
From automatically dishing out soap in the restroom to controlling the air-fuel ratio in your car’s engine, computers are everywhere. We interact with them constantly—some more than others—and the interaction is, unfortunately, not always as easy as we hope for. Can you remember the last time you got frustrated with your phone for auto-correcting the wrong word, the coffee machine at work refusing to follow instructions, or that notoriously slow automatic door at the mall? If you can, that device suffered from poor Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) design.