Overcoming encumbrances on the road to good theory: HCI as a catalyst for unified cognitive science

Current attempts to create a unified, multidisciplinary cognitive science have languished. This paper demonstrates how the human-computer interaction (HCI) paradigm can serve as a unifying framework for cognitive science. HCI has focused the research of many disciplines on the single domain of interaction design. Cognitive science, in contrast, has emphasized multidisciplinary research across a wide range of domains, resulting in disciplinary fragmentation. This paper demonstrates how limiting the domain breadth of cognitive science through HCI research curtails disciplinary fragmentation and drives unified theory building.