KEYNOTE SPEAKER

Experience and Empathy in HCI

Dr. John McCarthy
University College Cork, Ireland

Biography of the Keynote Speaker

John McCarthy is a senior lecturer in the Department of Applied Psychology, University College Cork. He teaches courses on Culture and Cognition and Cultures of Technology. He is visiting professor at the School of Communication, Technology and Design, Södertörn University College, Stockholm for 2007 and has previously held Visiting Fellowships at the University of York UK, and DIRC a UK Interdisciplinary Research Collaborations (IRC). He has published a monograph with MIT on technology and experience(with Peter Wright), helped edit some collected works, and published more than 60 peer-reviewed publications. He has just finished editing a special issue of Personal and Ubiquitous Computing (with Peter Wright and Mark Blythe) on 'Enchantment, Experience, and Interaction Design' that will be published later this year. His research interests include: conceptual foundations for experience-centered design; specific experiences with technology such as enchantment, absorption, intimacy; technological augmentation of public space. Bakhtin and Dewey's approaches to experience.

For the last few years, McCarthy has focused particularly on developing conceptual grounding for the growing but often confused and confusing area of 'user experience'. Concerned that 'user experience' and 'experience centered design' might be dismissed as temporary fashions or marketing ploys, McCarthy is keen to highlight the value of attention to experience in areas such as Interaction Design and Human Computer Action. He sees user experience as a corrective to the predominantly cognitive contribution of the human and social sciences in these areas and as having the potential to forge links between the study of interaction with technology and understanding and enriching discourses on self. He has published a book on the subject 'Technology as Experience' with Peter Wright (MIT Press 2004) and run a number of workshops in this area (e.g. DAC'2005 and CHI'2006 with Peter Wright, Mark Blythe, and Olav Bertelson). He is currently engaged in further conceptual and empirical work in the area, for example conceptualizing specific experiences such as enchantment (a forthcoming Personal and Ubiquitous Computing themed issue), exploring methodological issues (e.g. the value of empathy) and carrying out fieldwork on experience with technology in a variety of settings.