The Art of Interaction. Ernest Edmonds

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      CHAPTER 2

       A Little HCI History

       2.1 THE NAME HCI ITSELF

      Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) is a relatively new field that is always changing. Even its name has gone through many transformations. Of course the advocates of each new name wish to imply some shift of focus or scope for the subject, as indeed has happened.

      When I first worked in the field it was known as Man-Machine Interface, or a branch of Ergonomics or Human Factors (terms which still survive). Naturally, it turned out that the machines that mattered most to us were computers, so we started to talk about the Man-Computer Interface. Eventually, even the ground-breaking International Journal of Man Machine Studies (IJMMS, 2017) had to admit not only that we were concerned with computers but that the climate of opinion no longer accepted “man” as a generic term for all human beings. The journal moved with the times and changed its name to the International Journal of Human-Computer Studies.

      Having moved on to using the phrase Human-Computer Interface, we then saw that it was not the object, the interface, that was the main concern but it was actually the process of interaction. The name of the field then moved to Human-Computer Interaction or, in the case of the important society the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), Computer-Human Interaction. The ACM term removed a risk of ambiguity that some people were worried about. The subject is not concerned with computers that are human like (human computers) but about interaction between humans and computers.

      The next move was based on the recognition that a really key element of the area was “design”. Within the design community it is well recognised that many aspects transfer across domains, whilst others are quite specific. In our case, for example, interaction brings specific design concerns. So we now have a large body of work that goes under the heading of Interaction Design. Obviously, this does not cover all of HCI as it excludes, for example, studies of interaction behaviour that do not have direct design application. However, it is generally seen as another variant name in the field of HCI.

      Just as once we moved from “interface” to “interaction”, people have come to understand that the “experience” of interaction is often the key issue that we need to consider. Just think of Steve Jobs and the innovations he brought to the market at Apple (Isaacson, 2011). The result is another shift, this time to Experience Design. Some people will argue that designing experiences is not quite what is being done and that terms like Design for Experience or Experience-Centered Design capture it more accurately. In any case, Interaction Design is important in this book and will figure as such.

      We could go on, and these changes and transformations certainly will in the future. For this book, however, from now on I will use the term HCI in its most general sense to cover the range of work named in these many different ways: human computer interface, interaction design, experience design. etc.

2.2 FROM EASY-TO-USE TO USER EXPERIENCE

      In 1947, writing about programming the EDVAC computer, Mauchly said “Any machine coding system should be judged quite largely from the point of view of how easy it is for the operator to obtain results” (Mauchly, 1973). Ease of use was a concern in computing from the very beginning. Of course, Mauchly’s user was the “operator” or, as we would say today, the programmer. Quite a bit of HCI research has in the past been directed at the programmer and the design of programming languages, so he was hardly alone in adopting this focus.

      The late Brian Shackel’s paper “Ergonomics for a computer” was published in Design in 1959 and can be seen as the start of the serious consideration of research in HCI (Shackel, 1959). It brought our attention to the need to include human factors into computer science research.

      The next important steps were very much concerned with the “interface” as was indicated in the early names mentioned above. Ivan Sutherland completed his Ph.D. in 1963 in which he presented Sketchpad and many of the founding ideas of interactive computer graphics that are still relevant today (Sutherland, 1963). Shortly afterwards, Doug Engelbart invented the mouse (Engelbart, 1967). Taken together these advances in the computer interface laid down the foundations of modern interactive computing.

      An important conceptual moment for HCI was Alan Kay’s idea of the Dyna-Book, a small tablet-like computer designed to be used by children (Kay, 1972). It was way beyond any engineering capability available at that time but provided a vision of the future. As Mike Richards put it, when reviewing the iPhone in 2008, “After a forty-year delay, Alan Kay’s DynaBook might just have arrived” (Richards, 2008). Perhaps, really, the DynaBook has arrived in the form of the iPad, which, after all, was put on the shelf for a little while once Steve Jobs realised that a smaller version could be revolutionary: the iPhone (Isaacson, 2011: 468).