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).
Figure 2.1: Alan Kay’s sketch of DynaBook. Courtesy Alan Kay.
That Alan Kay’s vision of a machine that would be easy, natural, for children to use can surely be seen in the iPhone and iPad. It is commonplace to see very young children, of two or even one, manipulating these machines by pointing and swiping. Progress towards this end was made much stronger by the foundation of Xerox PARC (the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, now PARC) in 1970. This hothouse of computing development was driven by a general application led strategy—focused on the office—and by drawing in all that was innovative and promising, particularly, but not only, in the HCI area.
Also in 1970, Brian Shackel founded the HUSAT (Human Sciences and Advanced Technology) Research Institute at Loughborough University in the UK, which became a major center for HCI research (Shackel, 1992). Then, in 1976, SIGGRAPH held the UODIGS workshop on “User-oriented design of interactive graphics systems” (Treu, 1976). In the same year a conference on “Computing and People” was held in Leicester in the UK (Parkin, 1977). In 1978, the ACM Special Interest Group on Social and Behavioural Computing (SIGSOC) ran a panel at the ACM Conference on “People-oriented Systems: When and How?” So, a process that would lead to the first American conference on human-computer interaction in 1981, “The Joint Conference on Easier and More Productive Use of Computer Systems,” had started, and SIGSOC was transformed into SIGCHI. Note that the main preoccupations at this time were mostly ease of use and the consequential benefit to productivity.
Meanwhile, some people were dreaming about the magic of the DynaBook, of children “playing” with computers, and with the user’s enjoyment. A famous critical event was the visit by Steve Jobs, and others from Apple, to Xerox PARC in 1979 (Isaacson, 2011: 96). They saw the prototype machines with bitmap displays, using a mouse and emulating the use of paper and printing on the screen. Jobs was not slow to say that this was the future and that Apple needed to produce it, albeit at a tiny fraction of the cost. This was the start of the commercial move towards DynaBook and the 1984 launch of the Apple Macintosh computer.
In the second CHI conference, held in 1982, Tom Malone presented a paper about designing enjoyable user interfaces.
“In this paper, I will discuss two questions: (1) Why are computer games so captivating? And (2) How can the features that make computer games captivating be used to make other interfaces interesting and enjoyable to use?” (Malone, 1982).
This might be seen as the start of the research effort to look at user engagement and enjoyment as significant research and design issues.
Naturally, a concern for engagement and enjoyment points to the need to look hard at user experience. Kevin Biles’ 1994 paper in Computer Graphics, “Notes on Experience Design”, set the agenda:
“Technology, no matter what it is, isn’t the entertainment. The integration of technology needs to be seamless in an attraction, always letting the story and the overall experience take the front seat” (Biles, 1994).
The HCI trend from “ease of use” to “user experience” is the human side of the trend described by Jonathan Grudin as “tool to partner” (Grudin, 2016). Much of Grudin’s more detailed history can be interpreted in this human-oriented way, but, as I will show, there are trends that hardly focus on the computer side of HCI at all. In that respect, one particularly significant issue is embodiment. In the broad sense, this is concerned with understanding interaction in the physical and social context in which it takes place (Dourish, 2001). The concern for embodiment in art is sometimes very specifically about interaction that takes the body and movement fully into account, as in the case of dancers and performers. See the case that I discuss in Section 5.4.
In the next section, I will describe how recent developments have been bringing HCI closer to the human values found in art by concentrating on the support that can be offered to enhancing human creativity.
2.3 ON TO ENHANCING CREATIVITY
An interest in creativity began to flower in the Artificial Intelligence, Cognitive Science, and Design communities at the end of the 1980s. The “First International Conference on Computational and Cognitive Models of Creative Design” was held on a Great Barrier Reef island in 1989 and turned into a regular series (Gero and Maher, 1989). Margaret Boden (1991) published her book, The Creative Mind: Myths and Mechanisms, in 1991. The main thrust of this kind of work was in building and critiquing computational models of creative processes, but some designers and members of the HCI community also took a strong interest. They had a different focus, that of envisaging how computational systems might support and enhance human creativity.
This development seemed a natural extension to the HCI concerns for engagement and enjoyment. We were no longer locked into an HCI focus that emphasised work (the “easier and more productive use of computer systems” of the first CHI). Instead, interest was growing in entertainment, art, and pleasure. The values had changed. Of course, it turned out that a considerable amount of work involves creativity. Creativity in the Design domain was first to receive significant attention. It was found that the older emphasis on work was, in fact, on routine tasks: copy editing, for example, rather than writing a screen play.
In 1993, the first Creativity and Cognition conference was held at Loughborough University in the UK. This conference, and the many that followed, took a strong multidisciplinary approach in what was initially an exploration of a possible new area:
“…the cognitive modeling of creativity, the empirical study of the creative process and the theoretical reflection upon its characteristics are of concern to everyone involved whether artist, designer, philosopher, cognitive scientist, or computer scientist” (Edmonds, 1993).
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