Atlanta HCI Scene
Beyond Georgia Tech, the greater Atlanta metropolitan area is a hotbed of user experience, user interface and human-computer interaction professionals and development. We don’t have an exact count, but there are well over a thousand professionals in the area, working at all types of companies.
Many of these companies — Home Depot, Delta, NCR, CNN, Turner Broadcasting, AT&T, Verizon, IBM, Google, and UPS to name a few — are headquartered or have regional offices here. There are national and local advertising, web strategy, and design companies and consultancies. We also host a significant number of start-ups in the web space, including some started by MS MCI alumni and nurtured in Georgia Tech’s incubator.
With all these professionals working in a variety of roles, several professional groups have developed. Many of our students take advantage of the networking and career development opportunities presented by these groups:
You can also find a good sample of our Tweeters by searching for Atlanta user experience, Atlanta UX, or Atlanta UI.
Georgia Tech alone is a crucible of HCI research. For instance, the annual GVU Center and Digital Media “Demo Days” typically showcases about 100 projects. Many master’s projects are supervised by faculty and researchers from the schools, research labs, centers, and institutes who participate in these events. Other projects are done in partnership with companies in the Atlanta area and beyond, often supervised by alumni of our program or members of our Industrial Advisory Board.
And there are always HCI-related activities happening at GT and in Atlanta: weekly lunch-time talks by faculty and graduate students, design course poster sessions, meetings of the local CHI chapter and the GT Human Factors Society Chapter, Industrial Design showcases, distinguished lectures by visitors from Google, Microsoft, IBM and many others.
All this creates a wonderful HCI community, a melting pot of ideas that makes being here very exciting and energizing.