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Human Computer Interaction

Vanderbilt Human Computer Interaction (HCI) studies, designs, develops, and evaluates interactive technologies in context, examining how people interact with, use, experience, and appropriate them, and how those interactions shape human capabilities and outcomes.

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Mission Statement

Our mission is to advance the design, engineering, and understanding of interactive technologies. We study how people and groups experience, use, appropriate, and are affected by computing in the contexts of everyday life, work, learning, care, and public life.  Through interdisciplinary research spanning computer science, social and behavioral sciences, and design and engineering, we develop and evaluate interaction techniques, systems, and conceptual and empirical insights. Our cross-cutting commitments to trust, reliance, privacy and security, and accessibility guide work across every research pillar.

How HCI Contributes within the CCC

HCI’s primary object of inquiry is the relationship among people, interactive technologies, and the settings in which interaction occurs. HCI research investigates these relationships with the people who use technologies and in the contexts in which they occur.  HCI research produces, reshapes, or informs the design of interactive systems.

HCI researchers draw on and generate empirical accounts, theories, and design knowledge to define new interaction concepts and actionable principles. These in turn, guide the analysis, critique, construction, study, deployment, and improvement of technological artifacts. HCI contributions may therefore include empirical accounts of human-technology interaction; new interaction concepts and theories; design principles; and engineered artifacts that can be studied, deployed, and improved in use. HCI also conceptualizes new approaches to interaction—including interactions among people and between people and other digital systems—to address unmet needs, and designs and engineers artifacts that help us understand those approaches.

Collectively, Vanderbilt HCI connects foundational HCI with other areas of the CCC and at Vanderbilt, including AI, robotics, learning, health, work, accessibility, visualization, security, and computing and society. 

HCI, like Computing and Society (C+S), is methodologically flexible and includes quantitative, qualitative, and conceptual work. This complements C+S, which often centers the broader institutional, political, and societal consequences of computing, while creating productive points of intersection. HCI can work at individual, group, organizational, and public scales; its distinctive focus is how these scales inform the design and use of interactive systems.

Research Pillars

  • Human-Centered AI and Emerging Interaction Technologies

    Designing, engineering, and evaluating novel forms of interaction with AI, human-AI teams, robots, interactive agents, immersive systems, AR/VR, multimodal interfaces, and other emerging technologies.

    Bridges: Robotics and AIED

  • HCI for Societal Transformation and Public Life

    Designing and studying technologies that shape social and collaborative activity, communities, institutions, work and labor, mobility and cities, civic participation, and governance, and sustainability. Research may use participatory and community-engaged approaches while also addressing individual and small group action.   

    Bridges: C+S; Human-AI approaches to education (AIED)

  • Informal and Formal Learning and Work Environments and Development

    Creating and studying learning environments and sociotechnical systems that support formal and informal learning, collaboration, skill development, professional practice, and changing workplaces. This pillar includes human-centered AI for education, learning, and training, while attending to the ways technologies can build or erode capacity across schools, workplaces, and communities.

    Bridges: Human-AI approaches to education (AIED) and C+S

  • Accessibility, Health and Wellbeing Across the Lifespan

    Designing and evaluating inclusive technologies for health, care, personal informatics, disability, and assistive interaction across the lifespan. This work foregrounds accessibility as people’s meaningful ability to access, use, and benefit from technology, and connects human-centered design to partnerships across Vanderbilt’s medical, engineering, education, and disability related communities. 

    Bridges: VUMC, engineering, biomedical informatics

Core Faculty

Faculty Affiliates