Both teaching and research are interesting challenges. Good interface design is becoming increasingly important; there are way too many bad interfaces out there. I enjoy the challenge of trying to get students to learn and appreciate the subtle concepts that support the design of good interfaces. I often get very creative solutions from the group projects that they do in the HCI class, which is exciting and rewarding. One alum recently told me that what he learned in my class has been the most useful in the long term of what he learned at WPI. Wow! As for research, I've been studying how people design things for many years and have been involved with looking into how artificial Intelligence techniques might help designers. Recently, I've been researching topics such as design rationale (keeping track of the reasons people have for their decisions) as well as computational design creativity (how computers might produce designs that people would judge to be creative). This area includes asking how a computer might be surprised by a design it produced because many creative objects are at least a little surprising, even to the designer. Undergraduate projects and graduate theses have focused on intelligent interfaces and AI in design topics, some very cutting edge. It is tough to get stale in areas that move so quickly: students push, and topics pull, so faculty need to keep moving!