We said goodbye to the 2023 Master’s in HCI (MHCI) students on August 10th.
Today, literally two weeks to the day, we’re welcoming the 2024 MHCI cohort, along with new PhDs. It’s dizzying.
This week is orientation and students have returned to campus. At the same time, Pittsburgh is being absolutely swarmed with Lantern Flies. You keep hearing yelling and screaming as they land on people.
Today there is Four-Minute Madness, where HCII faculty each have four minutes to introduce themselves and their work to the incoming students. I signed up for a slot.
I didn’t really have much to plug besides myself and my classes, so I, inspired by Charles Eames, ended up giving four pieces of advice to the students:
Everything creative starts out as a mess. Until finally it isn’t.
You can be productive without being creative, but you can’t be creative without being productive.
Fully ⅓ of all so-called “creative” work is some real tedious shit.
Once you leave here, no one will pay you to do the easy, the expected, the obvious. AI will end up doing a lot of that. Your real value is going to be in the difficult, the unusual, the unexpected. Use your time here to train for that.