EDITOR Jonathan Grudin jgrudin@microsoft.com
Microsoft Research | jgrudin@microsoft.com
When I was in school, history was presented as an immutable timeline, stretching from the dawn of writing to about World War II, after which it was too controversial for children. My forays into the early days of HCI have revealed less constancy; history changes as our perspective changes. We continually rewrite history.
A well-attended event at CHI 2008 was “Usability Evaluation Considered Harmful,” featuring a critique of CHI reviewing practices by Saul Greenberg and Bill Buxton [ 1]. They argued that three HCI landmarks, featured in most HCI histories, omitted studies of use and therefore would have fared poorly at the hands of CHI reviewers. They wrote: “Usability evaluation, as practiced today, is appropriate for settings with well-known tasks and outcomes. Unfortunately, [it fails] to consider how novel engineering innovations and systems will evolve and be adopted by a culture over time.” Greenberg and Buxton stress that the CHI community needs to be far more liberal in considering what makes a valuable contribution.
Agreed, but on careful examination each of
these early contributions has more to say about
HCI history and practice than is generally noted.
[ 1] Greenberg, S., and B. Buxton. “Usability evaluation considered harmful (some of the time).” In Proceedings CHI 2008, 111–120. Florence, Italy: April 5–10, 2008. The paper presentation was followed by a panel discussion.
Greenberg and Buxton wrote:
“In 1945, Vannevar Bush introduced the idea of cross-linked information in his seminal article “As We May Think,” which in turn inspired Hypertext and the World Wide Web. Bush described a system called ‘Memex’ based on linked microfilm records. Yet he never built it, let alone evaluated it. Bush’s vision wasn’t even correct: it was constrained to knowledge workers. He certainly never anticipated the use of linked records for what are now the mainstays of the Web: social networking, e-commerce, pornography, and gambling. Even if he had done a usabil-
ity evaluation, it would have been based on tasks not considered central to today’s culture.” [Italics added.]
The Atlantic Monthly published Bush’s essay soon after another in which he used quarry mining as a metaphor for the pursuit of knowledge in the arts and sciences. Atlantic Monthly, a magazine of literary criticism, political analysis, and fiction, won two of the top four O. Henry short-story prizes in 1945. World War II was drawing to a close; “As We May Think” was accompanied by essays such as “For the Record: Buchenwald,” “Japan’s Secret Weapon,” “Should Jews Return to Germany,” and “Keeping the Country at Work.” Fiction by Vladimir Nabokov, Jessamyn West, Roald Dahl, and Raymond Chandler appeared that year, along with essays on Jefferson, Melville, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Tom Paine. In Nabokov’s story, a 90-year-old man writing in approximately the year 2015 about the strange world of 1945 reported that all technology self-destructed and vanished in an unspecified but spectacular way in the 1970s.
The Memex was a conceptual sketch of a huge, mechanical, microform-shuttling device that couldn’t be built even now. Had it been plausible, it would have been affordable only for elite knowledge workers, so Bush got that right. Rather than a failure of imagination, Bush’s vision of an information device that would be used by people who were not engineers was far ahead of its time. It was a key reason his writing inspired future generations and resonates with us today. And of course, user tests were neither a concern of Atlantic Monthly nor a possibility for a device that did not exist.
Bush’s focus on the expansion of knowledge in this essay and his “quarrying knowledge” essay published two months prior was part of a movement that began much earlier. In the 1930s science fiction pioneer H. G. Wells wrote and campaigned for a “World Brain” or “World Mind,” a microform-
September + October 2008
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