A former colleague/mentor from back when I was a research assistant at CSCL posted an article earlier this month over at Interaction-design.org that I thought I’d share some of my favorite tidbits from. His article talks about the history of HCI (Human-Computer Interaction) and how it carved out a niche (which really isn’t a niche by definition) for itself amongst the overlap of several disciplines.

Here’s a little bit of what he had to say.

“The challenge of personal computing became manifest at an opportune time. The broad project of cognitive science, which incorporated cognitive psychology, artificial intelligence, linguistics, cognitive anthropology, and the philosophy of mind, had formed at the end of the 1970s. [...] Thus, at just the point when personal computing presented the practical need for HCI, cognitive science presented people, concepts, skills, and a vision for addressing such needs.”

“…it no longer makes sense to regard HCI as a specialty of computer science; HCI has grown to be broader, larger and much more diverse than computer science. It expanded from individual and generic user behavior to include social and organizational computing, creativity, and accessibility for the elderly, the cognitively impaired, and for all people. It expanded from desktop office applications to include games, e-learning, e-commerce, military systems, and process control. It expanded from early graphical user interfaces to include myriad interaction techniques and devices, multi-modal interactions, and host of emerging ubiquitous, handheld and context-aware interactions.”

“In the early 1980s, HCI was a small and focused specialty area. It was a cabal trying to establish what was then a heretical view of computing. Today, largely due to the success of that endeavor, HCI is a vast and multifaceted community, loosely bound by the evolving concept of usability, and the integrating commitment to value human concerns as the primary consideration in creating interactive systems.”

Dr. Carroll really brings up an interesting point. I only became interested in HCI a few years ago, and it’s easy to find evidence that HCI was still emerging as a science in decades past. Ever hear about punch-cards? He mentions that the timing for this was “fortuitous”, and I’m inclined to agree — as technological engineering advanced, psychology has become a bigger part of building software features and interfaces.

Case in point: Imagine doing your taxes (something we all have to do) on something like Visicalc (which was immensely popular back then, apparently). I doubt you could do it without plenty of paper and a few missing chunks of your own hair. Now compare it to modern web-based tax software, which asks you natural-language questions about your finances, computes your taxes, and mails the forms for you with a guarantee. It’s easy to see how consideration for users has really grown in the past few decades, and Dr. Carroll hit the nail on the head. We’re lucky that advances in technology and psychology coincided so fortuitously. Just imagine Visicalc on a high-def display.