Opening New Worlds
The school’s Human-Computer Interaction Lab, or HCIL, doesn’t shy from tough challenges like improving health care or advancing children’s education, says its director, Associate Dean of Research Allison Druin. And she and her colleagues rarely take “no” for an answer.
More than a decade ago, Druin and Maryland computer scientist Ben Bederson, envisioned an online library of children’s books from around the world that would allow young people to learn about each other’s cultures in an entirely new way.
“Other researchers said it would never work, that it had too many technological and social roadblocks,” Druin says.
Today, the International Digital Children’s Library features 4,000 books in over 50 languages and is used by more than 3 million people globally.
It’s just one example of the life-changing work done in the lab, founded by iSchool affiliate faculty member Ben Shneiderman in 1983. The HCIL brings together computer science researchers with those from many other disciplines, such as psychology, education and engineering, to develop technologies that reflect people’s needs and dreams. Faculty and student researchers here have played significant roles in the development of hypertext/hypermedia, touch screens, menu selection, layout appropriateness and consistency, and the visualization, storage and management of all kinds of digital information.
HCIL members also have created or worked on public access systems for the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, Library of Congress and Smithsonian Institution; casework management systems for the Maryland Department of Juvenile Justice; home automation systems; education technologies and medical information systems.
“Our work has always been about designing the future of information, and not waiting for someone else to design it for you,” Druin says.
The future of information, Druin says, is reflected daily in the ongoing research in the HCIL. “Information is now faster. It is distributed. It is social. And it is exploratory,” she says.