UNDERSTANDING, APPLYING, and developing the field of human-computer interaction has specific relevance for the development of our society. Societal applications of any kind (like electronic governments or applications to support special needs) had, have, and will have an interface to users. Placing HCI education right at the center of a curriculum in information technologies and society (here the “and” has to be emphasized in particular) is a way to build it in.

The goal is to go further than the usual orientation of HCI as a multidisciplinary discipline. The context is within societal research, information theory, and transdisciplinarity. Thus students will get a variety of skills to apply in multidimensional problem solving. We see interdisciplinarity as major goal for the development of future practitioners to get the right skills to solve complex (interaction) problems. The Context. Located in a completely reconstructed building from the 15th century, the ICT&S (Information and Communications Technology & Societies) center was initiated as a focus area of the University of Salzburg in a joint action between the department of computer science and the department of communication science. New trends from information and communications technologies meet knowledge from social sciences. The central goal is to do research on interdisciplinary issues and combine different disciplinary strands.