Interactions - November/December 2018

form of impact: intellectual impact.

These are the clever interaction techniques, enlightening study results, novel sensing hardware, and other tasty morsels we reveal or invent that potentially create and shape new computing experiences.

The greatest opportunity to have HCI intellectual impact is in the very earliest stages of a product category. This is when the intellectual landscape is wide open, and questions and problems abound. Everything is new and there is no doctrine. This is when HCI innovators can come in, establish user needs, shape attitudes, define features, invent new lingo and methods, and fill capability voids with new enabling technologies. As with all innovation-driven pursuits, the rate and impact of contributions start high and naturally taper off as the subfield or product category matures. James Utterback and William Abernathy described this “innovation dynamic” back in 1975

[ 2] (Figure 2).

Unfortunately, I believe this gentle innovation roll-off that occurs synchronously with product maturation is inaccurate for HCI.

The real curve is much uglier and tells the story of a dilemma we as innovators in HCI must face. To be frank, I derive this thesis not from extensive research or interviews, but rather from my own views and experiences as an academic who’s had some luck in transferring technologies to industry, and also as an entrepreneur with my startup Qeexo [ 3], which has software on more than 150 million smartphones to date.

THE DILEMMA

First off, we need to extend our timeline, considering the period of work before embryonic activity, when the concept is a mere glint in an HCI community’s eyes. This almost always predates commercial activity, as borne out in Brad Myers’s 1998 Interactions article “A Brief History of Human Computer Interaction Technology” [ 4]. This holds true for today’s emerging HCI areas, like virtual and augmented reality (first researched in the late

1960s), voice-driven interfaces (also

1960s), and the Internet of Things and proliferation. Money is made!

Eventually, as the technology and market mature, improvement and adoption slow and there are diminishing returns. The product ages, and may even die, but for the sake of simplicity we’ll focus on the earlier periods.

Figure 1 is a reasonable generalization of a complex process—it’s still being taught today. In such graphs, the axes are important to note, as they elucidate the values of the chart’s designer.

In this case, I’ve chosen a popular
formulation that plots time against
market size, but you’ll also find
variants that use product sales,
revenue, number of problems solved,
technical maturity, and so on. These
are all important metrics, but they
also almost exclusively view the
process of innovation through a
business or technical lens.
For many HCI innovators, impact
is a professional and personal
goal. Impact, of course, is also an
imprecise word. Affecting millions
of lives (happiness, health, etc.)
through an app or feature that
you developed is without doubt
impactful. This type of impact
largely follows that S-curve, as more
users correlates with more influence.
But many in HCI, especially
academics, also seek a very specific
EMBRYONIC