What would an ideal CHI education look like?

What would you select if someone asked you to develop an ideal professional education in CHI’s essential subject matter? If someone were to ask me, first I would check the core CHI curriculum for computer science departments that an ACM SIGCHI committee (including professor Ron Baecker, University of Toronto, and others) put together about a decade ago when they were trying to get such curricula accepted within universities. However, the times, technology, and users have changed considerably since then. Another way to quickly assemble a set of essential topics would be to merge and purge the tables of contents for two leading handbooks of human-computer interaction published by Elsevier and by Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. With apologies to the editors and authors (including myself), I have tried to do just that, somewhat quickly and informally. I contemplated simply listing the approximately 120 topics in alphabetical order, but I have tried instead to reduce seeming repetitions, use more consistent terminology, and maintain some of the original overall organization and sequencing, which suggests the sequence of topics in a curriculum. See below for the results. Noticeable in the original tables of contents was an absence of reference to financial and travel systems, branding, marketing, semiotics, user experience, design patterns, legal issues, and professional licensing/standards (currently minimal or nonexistent in the industry). Also missing is the notion that a professional might actually have to sell her/his services: Thus, “storyselling,” portfolio preparation, and other marketing of services principles/techniques are omitted. In fact, the last of these topics often populate many Internet-based discussions and email threads, because every year there is a new crop of novice professionals who seek advice from elder mentors on everything from acquiring disability insurance to how to deal with clients who won’t pay for services rendered. If I had to disaggregate further the above topics into undergraduate and graduate subjects, well, that is a major task that many institutions have already attempted with varying degrees of success. If I were asked where might I place special emphasis, I would suggest the following: I believe different regions of the Earth, different countries, different socioeconomic-political conditions may give rise to different needs and orientations to courses of study. For example, I was impressed recently by professor Gary Marsden’s graduate-student projects at the University of Cape Town, South Africa, which focused on somewhat unique, indigenous circumstances. Graduate student projects took on objectives of assisting nutritional training for young mothers suffering from HIV/AIDS, encouraging involvement of schoolchildren with aboriginal story-