and software-development organizations? How did an understanding of the importance of usability testing spread from organization to organization? What was the role of CHI and other new conferences? To what extent were such innovations guided by systematic principles of user-centered, iterative design, such as those articulated by John Gould and his collaborators at IBM?

Understanding Workplace Context, and Designing for Humanization and Democratization Another phenomenon that started in Europe and spread to North America was the commitment to ground system design in a deep understanding of workplace context. The British sociotechnical design movement and the Scandinavian collec-tive-resource approach both aimed at humanizing the technology’s impact in the workplace. The latter philosophy later became the participatory design movement as it spread worldwide. North American recognition of the importance of workplace context and the role of methods rooted in anthropology and sociology was spurred by the influential work of Lucy Suchman at Xerox PARC in the mid-’80s. Since then many social scientists have been hired by corporations such as IBM, Microsoft, and Intel. Yet we lack a comprehensive scholarly history of the roles in these developments of various individuals, corporations, and academic institutions.

and the Web. We also have little insight into the interplay between academic research and industrial R&D, between publications and patents. Finally, except for the line from direct manipulation to the GUI, we have little understanding of how lines of development influenced each other.

Can we do better? Consider the history of medicine. The Wellcome Trust for the History of Medicine at University College London created the “Wellcome Witnesses to Twentieth Century Medicine”in 1993. There are currently 31 volumes, available in hard copy and online, that comprise important papers, records, photographs, and transcripts of daylong seminars in which significant figures in 20th-century medicine discuss specific discoveries or events in recent medical history.

There are some hopeful signs of similar activities in our field. Goldberg’s 1988 volume, A History of Personal Workstations, contains transcriptions of talks by major contributors to the development of personal workstations. More recently, the DigiBarn Computer Museum has held and recorded events with pioneers in the development of direct manipulation, the Alto, the Apple, the IBM PC, and the Macintosh.

Nonetheless, let us hope that some visionary corporation will step up and create the <your company’s name> Witnesses to Twentieth Century Human-Computer Interaction. It is urgent that this happen soon.

Toward a Richer Understanding
of the History of HCI

I have reviewed the early history of HCI—hypertext, direct manipulation, and the development of the GUI, then suggested that what happened next was a broadening of the field’s focus to incorporate the skills of graphic and industrial designers, applied psychologists, and social scientists. This brief article is not intended as the final word on any of these topics. Each short treatment could be a sketch of a future Timelines article, or, better yet, a Ph.D. thesis in the history of science and technology. This is my challenge to the readers.

We generally know the names of important contributors, but how they built on one another’s work is, for the most part, yet to be written. We don’t know what was happening in different places and the way ideas spread from country to country, especially in the days before email, the Internet,

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Delia Couto, whose research skills and diligent efforts assisted greatly in the preparation of this article, and to Jonathan Grudin for his encouragement and helpful suggestions. Thanks to Jennifer Keelan for acquainting me with the Wellcome Witnesses series, and to Eric Martin and William Newman for helpful suggestions.

Louis Fabian Bachrach

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Ronald Baecker is professor of computer science, the Bell University Laboratories chair in human computer interaction, and founder and chief scientist of the Knowledge Media Design Institute at the University of Toronto. He was named one of the 60 “Computer Graphics Pioneers” by ACM SIGGRAPH, elected to the CHI Academy by ACM SIGCHI, and awarded the Canadian Human Computer Communications Society Achievement Award. He has been working in “HCI” since 1966.

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March + April 2008