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intellectual overlap without them being equivalent. This lack of equivalence should not be seen as
indicative of much more than natural differentiation resulting from institutionalized activities at
the university department level. Although MIS and HCI can certainly be compared and contrasted
in terms of core theory and major venues of activity, a large source of difference naturally emerges
from the academic homes in which they exist and this source of difference will always affect the
development and shaping of the discipline.
That aside, from an information perspective, MIS can be considered to be primarily concerned
with identifying, abstracting, and supporting the data flows that exist in organizations, and develop-
ing or supporting the technological (broadly conceived) means of exploiting the potential to serve
organizational ends. Similarly, HCI seeks to maximize the use of information through the design
of humanly acceptable representational and manipulatory tools. These characterizations clearly
emphasize commonality but also highlight aspects or facets of interest that are more properly
thought of as belonging more in one discipline than in others.
An informational basis for comparing MIS and HCI could lead us to several interesting posi-
tions. First, is MIS just a bounded context of inquiry for tackling HCI problems? Given its indus-
trial and organizational application zone, the emphasis in much MIS work might be taken as a
sign of disinterest in some of the broader areas of inquiry pursued by certain mainstream HCI
researchers, e.g., work in hypermedia design for education, or the significant body of HCI work
that has addressed problems in aviation or vehicle interfaces (e.g., Wickens, 1991). There seems
to be no fundamental reason why much of what has emerged from MIS could not be of use in this
broader arena, but it is still the case that a typical MIS conference contains research that originates
in or is applied to a more constrained set of usage environments or contexts than would be found
at an HCI conference. This may be changing as MIS researchers begin to consider online education
and computer-mediated consumer behavior more broadly, but blurred or not, the boundaries still
remain.
A second interesting aspect of an informational analysis concerns the relative strengths of theory
in MIS and HCI. It is probably the case that theoretical structures have been more keenly erected
in MIS than in HCI. It is not obvious why this should be the case, since one might argue that
HCI's focus on human psychology would have enabled it to borrow easily from well-established
social science work in cognition. The problem, more likely, is that borrowing from cognitive psy-
chology has proven to be more problematic for HCI than borrowing from social psychology has
been for MIS, since the theoretical models driving work in perception, categorization, decision
making, etc., have limited generalizability when seeking guidance for design outside of decisions
that affect rapid aspects of interaction (keypresses, layout, image quality, etc.). There is little direct
guidance in cognitive psychology for designers interested in usability, with the result that empiricism
trumps rationalism in HCI literature.
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Like any applied field, MIS has also borrowed heavily from outside, although in doing so, it
has tended to emphasize more social psychological perspectives than cognitive ones. Social psy-
chological models have two distinct advantages: first, they tend to traffic in more observable human
actions; second, they place greater emphasis on the environment in which human action occurs
than do most cognitive approaches. As a result, the level of discourse that underlies MIS can more
easily transpose social psychological models to meaningful issues in the application domain. In
part this has been recognized in later HCI work, where concerns with collaboration and computer-
supported work have caused a shift in that field towards more socially informed theorizing.
If we can see HCI and MIS as highly overlapping, but differing mainly in terms of contexts stud-
ied and theoretical borrowings, it may be possible to identify research problems that both share or
could inform. A point of overlap for both MIS and HCI is the establishment of the purpose, the
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