Takeaway

We may not always be fully sure that our work will be recognized by institutional standards, but we can still be guided by the questions that keep us attentive, curious, and willing to build. For HCI researchers, half-sureness may not be a weakness, but part of working wholeheartedly with human complexity.

Full Text

It is time to talk about a cliché that still feels true. The world being reshaped by generative AI can feel strangely disorienting for HCI researchers.

The anxiety comes from many places: metrics such as citation counts and publication numbers that flatten the messy, humane challenges HCI researchers care about; empirical insights that feel meaningful in the field but are hard to translate into commercial capital or institutional indicators; and job-market questions that ask, in different ways, “What is your value?”

I do not always know whether my work is impactful enough by institutional standards. But I know when a research question keeps making me more attentive, more curious, and more willing to build. For now, that is enough reason to continue. I have always been drawn to questions of meaning, perhaps because I tend to approach work through feeling, reflection, and personal resonance. I try to spend my time on research questions I can keep returning to: how creative tools can augment human agency. While I do not always feel certain about this choice, on good days, it gives me enough energy to continue: intellectual sparks from collaborators, grounding resonance from practitioners, small, charming artifacts that emerge from the tools we build, awe when navigating the literature, and the thrill of trying to articulate emerging concepts and paradigms.

I drew inspiration and strength from these quotes. I was also deeply shaped by Existential Psychotherapy, which helped me think more clearly about life’s ultimate concerns. Once I started to accept that the world is inherently absurd, I felt strangely freer to choose my own terms. In this light, I find a quiet kind of balance in a Chinese saying: “善败者不乱” (“Those who excel at losing do not lose their composure”). Defeats happen, and they will keep happening. The question is whether they stop us from returning to what we love.

Well, who knows? I might face burnout one day, but the micro-environment around me still feels lovely today: beautiful melodies grounding my thoughts, the gentle crispness of the breeze, and peers nearby working with quiet, inspiring diligence. When I feel unsure, I try to return to smaller evidence: a participant’s phrasing that changes my thinking, a prototype behavior that reveals an unexpected possibility, a conversation that makes a vague concern more nameable. These moments do not always become citation counts or institutional indicators immediately, but they remind me why I entered HCI in the first place. Maybe we do not need complete certainty to keep going. Maybe half-sureness is not a weakness, but the condition under which much human-centered research is done.