HCI History 1 Note on Historiography Whig History

HCI History 1

Note on Historiography Whig History: • History of the winners (today’s perspective) • Inevitable technological progress Internalist History of Technology • Sole focus on the technology rather than social forces shaping and shaped by the technology Technological determinism: • Technology determines history or • Progress is driven by technical innovation that follows an inevitable path 2

Brad Meyers • Meyers, B. A. (1998). A Brief History of Human Computer Interaction Technology. • ACM Interactions, 5(2), 44 -54. 3

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The usual suspects • WIMP Interfaces (GUI) – Windows, Icons, Mouse, Pointing – Direct Manipulation – Metaphors • Hypertext / WWW • Person-to-person computing – Communication – Collaboration CSCW – Instruction 5

What is missing? ? “Internalist” history focuses on the functionality and development of technology but lacks recognition of the social and political context that shapes and is shaped by the technologies – University research – Market and Industry R&D – Political forces 6

The technologies • But let’s look quickly at the key developments said to set the stage for the emergence of Human-Computer Interaction 7

Innovator: Ivan Sutherland • Sketch. Pad - 1963 Ph. D thesis at MIT – Hierarchy - pictures & sub-pictures – Master picture with instances (i. e. , OOP) – Icons – Copying – Light pen input device – Recursive operations 8

The Ubiquitous ASR 33 Teletype • ASR: Automatic Send / Receive • Store programs on punched paper tape • The first direct human-computer interface experience for many in the 1960 s • About 10 characters per second - 110 bps 9

The Ubiquitous Glass Teletype • 24 x 80 characters • Up to 19, 200 bps – BPS? – Bits per second Source: http: //www. columbia. edu/acis/history/vt 100. html

About Doug Engelbart • Invented the mouse • 1962 Paper "Conceptual Model for Augmenting Human Intellect" – Complexity of problems increasing – Need better ways of solving problems Picture from www. bootstrap. org 11

Augmenting Human Intellect • Advantages of chord keyboards? • Disadvantages? Jason Hong / James Landay, UC Berkeley, http: //sloan. stanford. edu/Mouse. Site/Mouse Site. Pg 1. html 12

Augmenting Human Intellect “At SRI in the 1960 s we did some experimenting with a foot mouse. I found that it was workable, but my control wasn't very fine and my leg tended to cramp from the unusual posture and task. ” http: //sloan. stanford. edu/Mouse. Site. Pg 1. html 13

Augmenting Human Intellect Chorded Keyboard Early 3 -button mouse 14

Augmenting Human Intellect First mouse • First hypertext First word processing • First 2 D editing and • windows • • First document version control • • First groupware (shared screen teleconferencing) First context-sensitive help First distributed clientserver Many, many more! 15

Early Personal Computers • 1975 IBM 5100 • 1977 Radio Shack TRS-80 16

Early Personal Computers • 1997 Apple II • 1979 Visi. Calc - “killer app” for Apple II • 1981 IBM XT/AT 17

The dawn of the PC & GUI Xerox PARC • Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) • Established 1970 – Bob Taylor heads CSL - Computer Systems Lab • Goal: “The Paperless Office” – Are we there yet? • “Inventing the future” – Researchers using their new creations as their own tools - bootstrapping 18

Side note: “invent the future” “Don’t worry about what anybody else is going to do. The best way to predict the future is to invent it. Really smart people with reasonable funding can do just about anything that doesn’t violate too many of Newton’s Laws!” Is the Best Way to Predict the Future to Invent It? Or to Prevent It? – Title of Alan Kay. s Keynote Address for CHI 98: April 18 -23, 1998, Los Angeles, CA USA. Alan Kay, in an email on Sept 17, 1998 to Peter W. Lount The origin of the quote came from an early meeting in 1971 of PARC, Palo Alto Research Center, folks and the Xerox planners. In a fit of passion I uttered the quote! http: //www. smalltalk. org/alankay. html I said that to the Xerox planners back in 1971. They were worrying about what the rest of the world was going to do and the statement was made to get them to understand that as long as we had some top technologists, we didn’t have to worry about what anybody else was going to do -- we could just do it ourselves. And we did. http: //www. convergemag. com/Publications/CNVGSept 99/IN%20 CLOSE/INCLOSE/In. Close. shtm 19

Alan Kay • Dynabook - Notebook sized computer loaded with multimedia and can store everything • • • Personal computing Desktop interface Overlapping windows 20

PARC Hardware Milestones • • Laser printer 1971 Alto personal computer 1973 808 x 606 raster bitmapped display 3 -button mouse, keyboard Ethernet 1973 Merges printing, display and networking Real-time windowing operations (Bit. Blt) 1973 21

PARC Software Milestones • Bravo WYSIWYG text editor/formatter 1974 • Gypsy text editor with GUI and modeless cut and paste editing 1975 • Draw drawing program 1975 • Superpaint program 1974 -75 22

Xerox Star - 1981 • First commercial PC designed for “business professionals” – desktop metaphor – pointing – WYSIWYG – high degree of consistency and simplicity • First system based on formal usability engineering – Paper prototyping and analysis – Usability testing and iterative refinement 23

Xerox Star Desktop

Xerox Star - 1981 Commercial flop • $15 k cost • closed architecture • lacking key functionality (spreadsheet) 25

Apple Lisa - 1982 • Based on ideas of Star • More personal rather than office tool – Still $$$ - $10 K to $12 K • Failure 26

Apple Macintosh - 1984 • Aggressive pricing – $2500 • Good interface guidelines • Third party applications • Great graphics, laser printer 27

Direct Manipulation • ‘ 82 Shneiderman described appeal of rapidlydeveloping graphically-based interaction – object visibility – incremental action and rapid feedback – reversibility encourages exploration – replace language with action – syntactic correctness of all actions • WYSIWYG, Apple Mac 28

Metaphor • Use involves problem-solving or learning to some extent • Relating computing to real-world activity is effective learning mechanism – File management on office desktop – Financial analysis as spreadsheets • The tension between literalism & magic – Eject disk or CD on Mac by dragging to trash can 29

Person-to-Person Communications • Enabled by several technologies – Ethernet and TCP/IP protocol – Personal computer – Telephone network and modems • And by killer-app software – Email, Instant Messaging, Chat, Bulletin Boards • CSCW - conferencing, shared white boards • Not quite yet a killer-app • Micro-sociological phenomenon are central to successes (and failures) 30

CSCW • • Computer-Supported Cooperative Work No longer single user/single system Micro-social aspects are crucial E-mail as prominent success but other groupware still not widely used 31

Hypertext • Think of information not as linear flow but as interconnected nodes • Bush’s MEMEX gave the idea in 1945 • Nelson coined term in 1965 • Engelbart’s NLS did it in 1965 • WWW in ’ 93 was the real launch 32

Speech / Agents • Actions do not always speak louder than words • Interface as mediator or agent • Language • How good does it need to be? – “Tricks”, vocabulary, domains • How “human” do we want it to be? – (HAL, Bob, Paper. Clip) 33

Ubiquitous Computing • Person is no longer user of single device but occupant of computationally-rich environment • "Ubiquitous computing names the third wave in computing, just now beginning. First were mainframes, each shared by lots of people. Now we are in the personal computing era, person and machine staring uneasily at each other across the desktop. Next comes ubiquitous computing, or the age of calm technology, when technology recedes into the background of our lives. ” - Marki Weiser, circa 1988 34

Computing is Everywhere, . . . • From the desk-top to the set-top to the palmtop to the flip-top to the wrist-top… Dick Tracy ®&© 1999 Tribune Media Services, Inc 35

VR & 3 D Interaction • Create immersion by – Realistic appearance, interaction, behavior • Draw on spatial memory, proprioception, kinesthesis, two-handed interaction 36

Mobile Computing • Devices used in a variety of contexts • Employ sensors to understand how user is working with devices • Wireless communication • PDAs, Cell Phones, GPSs, etc etc 37

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Note on Historiography Whig History: • History of the winners (today’s perspective) • Inevitable technological progress Internalist History of Technology • Sole focus on the technology rather than social forces shaping and shaped by the technology Technological determinism: • Technology determines history or • Progress is driven by technical innovation that follows an inevitable path 39

What’s the point? • What’s the point(s) of last discussion? • What’s the point(s) of Chapter 1 of ID? • What’s the connection? 40

Study of THE USER (experience) Rather than the machine 41

The context of emergence of HCI Why (when) did USERS become so important in computing? • When did masses start using important computer systems? – Safety critical? – Aerospace – Astronauts highly trained and very few, infrequent – Pilots are MANY and frequent • Air Traffic controllers • Airline booking agents (distributed, complex, big money) 42

Consumers (entertainment) – Gaming – Joystick, TV (Pong), Arcades (Pac Man) 43

(Public) Education The pocket calculator TI 30 (1977) • • • Display is 8 digits, red LED. Four function, memory, scientific functions. Integrated circuit - Texas Instruments TMC 0981. 44

Cold War • Decentralization of communication and resources in case of nuclear attack – Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) 1960 s – NSFNet (1980 s) – Commercial 45

HCI The early field and science • Early HCI emerged out of human factors engineering • Focus on sensory-motor operations describing interactions of people and computers such as hand movement and similar physical behaviors. 46

Fitts Law 1954 • Field of Experimental Psychology • Model of psychomotor behavior • Predicts how fast or accurate a human can aim and move an appendage (like a hand) in a line from rest to a specified target some distance away. • Fitts found that movement time (MT) was a logarithmic function of distance (A) for a given target size or width (W) and, similarly, movement time was a logarithmic function of target size for a given distance. The law is given by the equation below: • MT = a + b log 2 (2 A/W) , where a and b are regression coefficients. 47

Fitts Law applied to HCI • By the late 1970 s, early HCI researchers were applying Fitts law to model human interactions with input mechanisms. • Card, S. K. , English, W. K. , & Burr, B. J. (1978). Evaluation of Mouse, Rate-controlled Isometric Joystick, Step Keys, and Text Keys for Text Selection on a CRT. Ergonomics, 21, 601 -613. • Early use of Fitts to describe how well subjects could use input devices (joystick and mouse) to select text on a Cathode Ray Tube (CRT) display 48

The Emerging Field of HCI mid 1980 s • HCI researchers had begun to campaign for the acceptance as a legitimate “science” • complete with – research agenda – distinct methods and goals 49

HCI as a “science” Newell 1985 • Plenary address of the major HCI conference hosted by the Association for Computing Machinery, CHI ’ 85 Conference • HCI model: Goals, Operators, Methods, and Selection (GOMS) – extended cognitive psychology orientations to research on HCI 50

Focus on users Pragmatism is a better philosophical basis for understanding (and studying) HCI than the rationalism that guide conventional and traditional thinking. 51

Naïve conventional model of information flow (rationalist) Human-Computer Interaction Information flows from person to computer, to person, and so on…. 52

From rationalism to pragmatism • The rationalist attitudes concentrate on logic and theory rather than attention to the needs of computer users. • Understanding technology as it is situated in the organization of social activities • Pragmatism: – knowledge and technology is socially situated. – Scientific theories and logic are tools used in a certain social practice. – Interface I/O metaphors guide users • Desktop, folders, menus, 53

John Gould (1988) "How to Design Usable Systems" • focus on the needs of users from the very start of the project. • four simple principles: – early and continuous focus on users – early and continual testing – iterative design as result of testing – integrated design, all elements develop constantly and in coordination

Interface as a commodity 55

Project Teams • Online Survey (for project teams) • Quick inventory for teaming. • Listserve email DUE THIS Thursday 56