Traditional computer science is often technology-centered, focusing on capability, efficiency, accuracy, and automation. While powerful, this approach alone can lead to systems that look great on paper but are frustrating, confusing, or simply ignored in practice. Human-centered approaches flip this: they design systems around human needs, behaviors, and contexts. This is the focus of Human-Computer Interaction or HCI, the subfield of computing that asks not just ‘Can we build this?’ but ‘Will people want to learn and use it’?, ‘Will people actually use it’? or ‘Will this cause damage to people and societies?’ You can think of HCI as the ‘salt in a meal’–rarely the main ingredient, but absolutely essential. When it’s missing, everything feels off. When it’s right, technology becomes intuitive, effective, and sometimes even invisible.
This talk offers a quick tour of HCI as an interdisciplinary field where computer science meets psychology, sociology, and design, and shows how an outside-in, human-first perspective can change what we build, and why it matters. It will also cover the nature of contemporary research and praxis in HCI.
Bio: Sruti S Ragavan is an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science, and an Adjunct in the Department of Cognitive Sciences at IIT Kanpur, India. Before that, she was a HCI researcher in the Calc Intelligence group at Microsoft Research in their Cambridge (UK) lab. She did her PhD in Computer Science at the Oregon State University. Her research interests are in Human-Computer Interaction, with a specific interest in building systems for users that are not savvy with the technology they must use.
