[Sigia-l] Re: Indian summers?

[Manu Sharma]

Ziya:
>> http://www.iesup.org/index.html
>
> Hmm. Interesting. But is it all/mostly academic? I just didn't get a sense
> of it being commercial.

IESUP was a two year European Union funded project ending in December last 
year to promote usability in India through events like workshops, seminars 
etc. It had no commercial interests, the idea was to bring both educational 
institutions and the industry together in promoting HCI.

I was involved in some of the events and we had mixed success getting 
universities interested. Unlike Europe and US, an academic HCI community 
does not exist in India with only a few institutions [1] imparting any kind 
of formal training in HCI related subjects. So events ended up only 
"academically inclined" and the relatively large industry participation 
(typically represented by employees of large software services firms) 
sometimes left disappointed with the academic nature of talks.

That said, the final India HCI conference [2] held at Bangalore in December 
brought the community together with participation by over 180 people for the 
two day event. The interest in the field is growing rapidly [3] as evidenced 
in the membership of the only large discussion group [3] on the subject, 
having swelled from 300 two years ago to 736 today.

Manu.

[1] Educational Institutions offering HCI training

Industrial Design Centre at IIT Mumbai
http://www.idc.iitb.ac.in
Department of Design at IIT Guwahati
http://www.iitg.ernet.in/engfac/design/public_html
National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad
http://www.nid.edu/

[2] India HCI conference, Dec 2004 Bangalore
http://www.idc.iitb.ac.in/~anirudha/ihci2004ConferenceProgramme.htm

[3] User Experience in India: State of the Profession 2004 (results of 
survey by Rashmi Sinha)
http://www.uzanto.com/papers/UXIndiaSurvey2004.html

[4] HCI IDC Yahoo group
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/hciidc/