Interactions - November/December 2018

research having been done decades prior and floating in the ether since.

As Buxton wryly noted, “There
are no new ideas. Just refinements
of old ones, iterating until some
amorphous perfect storm wave
sweeps them to overnight success!”
The growth phase is when a
dominant design emerges [ 2] and
products begin to ossify. In my
view, this transition from growth to
maturity is the most painful time
for HCI innovators, as it feels like
industry has reached escape velocity
and no longer wants or needs outside
ideas. What’s worse is that new and
good ideas are often rejected, as
products have to satisfy an existing
customer base. This is the HCI
innovator’s Trough of Disillusion
(Figure 5): A product has reached
peak success and influence, yet we
have little influence and get little
credit. It isn’t until a product ages
that the spigot of new ideas opens
slightly, when companies have
exhausted in-house ideas and begin
impact of HCI research rapidly falls
away (Figure 5). We’ve entered
the growth phase. There’s now a
critical mass of expertise, and the
community commercializing the
idea dwarfs the original research
community, some of whom may
have even moved on to different
research areas in the intervening
decades. The lineage of ideas grows
obscure, with most of the good ideas
from the literature now on people’s
lips, origin unknown, fostering the
belief that everything was invented
in-house. As the commercial stakes
mount, there is also a trend to
firewall ideas from escaping and
entering organizations, creating
intellectual echo chambers. Steve
Jobs proclaimed (and may have even
believed), “We have invented a new
technology called ‘multitouch’ which
is phenomenal.” That said, I do
suspect that many good HCI ideas
are reinvented at this stage. I also
suspect this reinvention wouldn’t
happen in a vacuum, without that

We’re faced with a dilemma as a community: When ideas have real users and real value, our ability to launch HCI innovations tends to fall on deaf ears.

NFORMATION ACMINTERACTIONS NOVEMBER/DECEMBER2018 19;057

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