Reviewing the Big Questions Literature; or, Should HCI Have Big Questions? Jordan Beck, Erik Stolterman School of Informatics and Computing Indiana University Bloomington 919 E. 10 th Street, Bloomington, IN USA {joebeck, estolter}@indiana.edu ABSTRACT What are big questions? Why do scholars propose them? How are they generated? Could they be valuable and useful in HCI research? In this paper we conduct a thorough review of “big questions” literature, which draws on scholarship from a variety of fields and disciplines. Our intended contribution is twofold. First, we provide a substantive review of big questions scholarship, which to our knowledge has never been done before. Second, we leverage this summary as a means of examining the value and utility of big questions in HCI as a research discipline. Whether HCI decides that generating and having big questions would be a desirable path forward, we believe that examining the potential for big questions is a useful way of becoming more reflective about HCI research. Author Keywords Big questions; research questions; HCI; disciplinarity; cohesion; intellectual progress; status ACM Classification Keywords H.5.m. Information interfaces and presentation (e.g., HCI): Miscellaneous. INTRODUCTION HCI as an academic discipline has been grappling with questions about its identity for some time. These questions have focused on issues of legitimacy and cohesion [12,13] as well as on the complex and problematic role of design as a knowledge-generating activity [3,27,37,77]. Over the years these issues have persisted in some form or another, but there has been what seems like a recent influx in the number of researchers asking questions and expressing concerns about the complex and at times confusing nature of HCI as a research discipline. For instance, Grudin has authored a series of articles examining the evolution of HCI. He has explored the possibility that HCI can be understood in terms of three discrete research threads that have not coalesced into a single, unified whole [28]. He has argued that an emphasis on conference publications (as opposed to journals or books) has contributed to the maintenance of “fragmented” knowledge production practices [29]. And he has suggested that “HCI will for some time be in its early days,” [30] which might be one reason why contemporary researchers attend to questions about the nature of the discipline [39,66,67]. If HCI is a young or “adolescent” discipline, then maybe it makes sense that it entails a variety of divergent research questions and approaches. But at some point, do we not have to progress past adolescence? It may be this question of progress and maturation that led Yvonne Rogers [67] to warn that HCI may be heading towards an “identity crisis,” which would result from an inability to achieve greater unity and cohesion in its research. A discipline in crisis may not be able to identify its core object of study or its core research constructs and thus it may not be able to lay claim to certain kinds of knowledge growth. Over the years, surveys of the discipline have helped identify trends or themes in HCI research [33,67] as well as trends or themes that might be conspicuously absent. In one notable recent study [49], Liu et al. used co-word analysis to examine two decades’ worth of CHI publications and found that their sample lacks “motor themes.” Motor themes describe “mature” research topics that have been the object(s) of significant collaborative knowledge building efforts. Explanations have been put forth as to why HCI lacks motor themes and, perhaps more broadly, why it lacks focus and cohesion [44,59,65,66]. And there have also been forward-looking proposals that seek to achieve focus, cohesion, or unity—perhaps with the dual goal of developing motor themes and cultivating a clearer sense of identity as a discipline. Grudin [30] has discussed the value of historical studies of the discipline as a tool for unifying research and identifying possible paths for development. Reeves [66] has proposed Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from Permissions@acm.org. DIS 2017, June 10 - 14, 2017, Edinburgh, United Kingdom Copyright is held by the owner/author(s). Publication rights licensed to ACM. ACM 978-1-4503-4922-2/17/06…$15.00 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/3064663.3064673