Human Computer Interaction
Definition
Human-computer interaction (HCI) is the academic and professional field concerned with the design, evaluation and implementation of interactive computing systems, and with the phenomena surrounding their use. It sits at the meeting point of computer science, cognitive psychology, design, and — increasingly — anthropology and sociology.
History
The field has a datable prehistory. Vannevar Bush's "As We May Think" (1945) proposed the memex; J. C. R. Licklider's "Man-Computer Symbiosis" (1960) argued that the significant future of computing lay in a tight coupling between people and machines rather than in machines replacing them; Engelbart's Augmenting Human Intellect (1962) and the 1968 demonstration supplied the working prototype. Xerox PARC in the 1970s produced the graphical interface, and the arrival of personal computers made usability a commercial concern rather than a research one.
HCI became a named discipline around 1980, with the first CHI conference in 1982 and Card, Moran and Newell's The Psychology of Human-Computer Interaction (1983), which imported cognitive psychology's methods wholesale.
The Three Waves
A standard periodisation, due to Susanne Bødker and others, is useful for seeing what changed:
- First wave — human factors and ergonomics. The user as a component in a system, studied for error rates and physical fit. Method: engineering and experimental psychology.
- Second wave — cognitive. The user as an information processor with a mind that can be modelled. Predictive models (GOMS, Fitts's law), mental models, Norman's stages of action. Setting: the workplace, one user, one task, one machine.
- Third wave — situated, embodied, cultural. The recognition that use is social, contextual, emotional and non-instrumental. Lucy Suchman's Plans and Situated Actions (1987) is the pivotal text, arguing from ethnomethodology that human action is improvised in response to circumstances rather than executed from plans — which invalidated a great deal of the cognitive modelling that preceded it. This wave brought participatory design, activity theory, CSCW, and the ethnographic methods that connect HCI to anthropology.
Core Concepts
- Affordances and signifiers — what a system permits, and what indicates it.
- The gulfs of execution and evaluation — the two places interaction breaks.
- Mental models — the divergence between how a system works and how a user believes it works.
- Fitts's law — the mathematical relation between target size, distance and pointing time, and one of the few genuinely predictive laws in interface design.
- Usability and its measures — effectiveness, efficiency, satisfaction; and the recognition, largely from the third wave, that these do not exhaust what an interface is for.
- Participatory design — the Scandinavian tradition of designing with the people who will use a system, on the argument that they hold knowledge the designers do not.
Criticism
HCI has been criticised for taking the individual user at a desk as its default subject long after that ceased to be typical, for an evaluation culture that rewards measurable micro-improvements over consequential questions, and for treating the interests of the person using a system and the organisation deploying it as identical. Work on dark patterns, on labour, and on the politics of design has pushed against the last of these.
Relevance to Cyborg Anthropology
HCI is the discipline that studies the seam this field is interested in. Its third wave arrived, by its own route, at the position cyborg anthropology starts from: that use is situated, embodied and cultural, and that a system cannot be evaluated apart from the life it is embedded in.
