In March 2007, academic and industrial researchers from many different countries and diverse backgrounds, including computing, social science, and design, met in Seville, Spain, for a two-day workshop entitled “HCI in 2020.” The event, sponsored by Microsoft Research Cambridge, U.K., was a chance to air views, reflect, and discuss the future of HCI as well as issues of central importance to the field. Needless to say, participants expressed a wide range of opinions, but they were virtually unanimous that the field of HCI must change its scope and methods if it is to remain relevant in the 21st century.
While the researchers agreed as well on the need to keep human values at HCI’s core, they highlighted the fact that our changing relationship with computers means that determining what these values might be and coming to understand them require greater finesse than ever before. If in the past HCI was in the business of understanding how people could become more efficient through the use of computers, the challenge confronting the field now is to deal with issues that are much more complex and subtle. Here we summarize these issues, basing our discussion on the workshop’s report Being Human: Human-Computer Interaction in the Year 2020.
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When the field of HCI was in its infancy, a common activity was to model a user’s interaction with a desktop computer so that the interface between person and machine could be optimized. HCI was mainly a scientific and engineering endeavor, using techniques derived from cognitive psychology and human-factors engineering. 8 What went on “inside the head” of a user was specified by observing behavior under controlled conditions, inferring what kinds of perceptual, cognitive, and motor processes were involved, and developing pertinent theories. 2 Methods for optimizing “usability” were devised, and iterative testing with real users was seen as prerequisite to introducing any new software or hardware product.
During the 1990s, the objectives of HCI began changing along with the growth of communication networks
that link computers. Researchers started asking how users, with the aid of computers, might interact with each other. 13 Researchers with backgrounds in more socially oriented sciences, such as sociology and anthropology, began to engage with HCI. These disciplines emphasized not only the effects of computing on groups of users but also how those very same groups appropriated computers, interpreted them, and socially and emotionally experienced their relationships with the technology. Several of the approaches of these disciplines were added to the mix with ethnographic approaches being especially visible.
The practical result of these developments is that HCI has become an academic discipline in its own right, with conferences dedicated to the subject as well as departments and courses offering HCI as a speciality, and it has also become an integral part of the design processes—typically, user-centered— for nearly all technology companies. 14 Moreover, an understanding of HCI (if not its details or techniques) has seeped into the broader consciousness, as the common use of terms such as “user-friendliness” and “user experience” in the news media and everyday conversation attest. Such awareness, among practitioners and users alike, has encompassed computers not only in the conventional sense of, say, desktop systems but also as they are manifested in cars, airplanes, mobile phones, and a broad array of other products.
In parallel, important changes in research objectives have also taken place within the field. The HCI of today is exploring diverse new areas beyond the workplace, including the role of technology in home life and education and even delving into such diverse areas as play, spirituality, and sexuality. HCI is now more multidisciplinary than ever, with a significant percentage of the community coming from the design world. This shift has caused the field’s practitioners to think more broadly about their design goals, taking into account not just how technology might be functional or useful but also how it might provoke, engage, disturb, or delight.
Despite the progress, gradual but now
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