Transcript History - Dan Dunlap

HCI History
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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
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Brad Meyers
• Meyers, B. A. (1998). A Brief History of Human
Computer Interaction Technology.
• ACM Interactions, 5(2), 44-54.
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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
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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
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The technologies
• But let’s look quickly at the key developments
said to set the stage for the emergence of
Human-Computer Interaction
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Innovator: Ivan Sutherland
• SketchPad - 1963 PhD thesis at MIT
– Hierarchy - pictures & sub-pictures
– Master picture with instances (i.e., OOP)
– Icons
– Copying
– Light pen input device
– Recursive operations
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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
1960s
• About 10 characters per second - 110
bps
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The Ubiquitous Glass Teletype
• 24 x 80 characters
• Up to 19,200 bps
– BPS?
– Bits per second
Source: http://www.columbia.edu/acis/history/vt100.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
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Augmenting Human Intellect
• Advantages of chord
keyboards?
• Disadvantages?
Jason Hong / James Landay, UC Berkeley,
http://sloan.stanford.edu/MouseSite/Mouse
SitePg1.html
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Augmenting Human Intellect
“At SRI in the 1960s 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/MouseSite/MouseSitePg1.html
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Augmenting Human Intellect
Chorded
Keyboard
Early
3-button
mouse
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Augmenting Human Intellect
•
•
•
•
First mouse
First hypertext
First word processing
First 2D editing and
windows
• First document
version control
• First groupware (shared
screen teleconferencing)
• First context-sensitive help
• First distributed clientserver
• Many, many more!
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Early Personal Computers
• 1975 IBM 5100
• 1977 Radio Shack
TRS-80
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Early Personal Computers
• 1997 Apple II
• 1979 VisiCalc - “killer app”
for Apple II
• 1981 IBM XT/AT
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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
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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/CNVGSept99/IN%20CLOSE/INCLOSE/InClose.shtm
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Alan Kay
•
Dynabook - Notebook sized computer loaded with
multimedia and can store everything
•
•
•
Personal computing
Desktop interface
Overlapping windows
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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 (BitBlt) 1973
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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 paint program 1974-75
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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
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Xerox Star Desktop
Xerox Star - 1981
Commercial flop
• $15k cost
• closed architecture
• lacking key functionality
(spreadsheet)
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Apple Lisa - 1982
• Based on ideas of Star
• More personal rather than office tool
– Still $$$ - $10K to $12K
• Failure
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Apple Macintosh - 1984
• Aggressive pricing
– $2500
• Good interface guidelines
• Third party
applications
• Great graphics,
laser printer
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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
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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
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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)
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CSCW
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•
•
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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
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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
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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, PaperClip)
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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
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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
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VR & 3D Interaction
• Create immersion by
– Realistic appearance, interaction, behavior
• Draw on spatial memory, proprioception,
kinesthesis, two-handed interaction
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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 etc
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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
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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?
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Study of THE USER (experience)
Rather than the machine
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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)
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Consumers (entertainment)
– Gaming
– Joystick, TV (Pong), Arcades (Pac Man)
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(Public) Education
The pocket calculator
TI 30 (1977)
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•
•
Display is 8 digits, red LED.
Four function, memory, scientific functions.
Integrated circuit - Texas Instruments
TMC0981.
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Cold War
• Decentralization of communication and
resources in case of nuclear attack
– Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) 1960s
– NSFNet (1980s)
– Commercial
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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.
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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.
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Fitts Law applied to HCI
• By the late 1970s, 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
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The Emerging Field of HCI
mid 1980s
• HCI researchers had begun to
campaign for the acceptance as a
legitimate “science”
• complete with
– research agenda
– distinct methods and goals
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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
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Focus on users
Pragmatism is a better philosophical basis for
understanding (and studying) HCI than the
rationalism that guide conventional and
traditional thinking.
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Naïve conventional model
of information flow (rationalist)
Human-Computer Interaction
Information flows from person
to computer, to person, and so on….
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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,
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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
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Project Teams
• Online Survey (for project teams)
• Quick inventory for teaming.
• Listserve email
DUE THIS Thursday
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