The status of human-computer interaction

Human-computer interaction (HCI) has had a both long and troublesome relationship to the role of ‘science’. HCI’s status as an academic object in terms of coherence and adequacy is often under discussion, which leads to desires for establishing a true scientific discipline. In this paper I explore formative cognitive science influences on HCIhttp://www.cusabio.com/, through the impact of early work on the design of input devices. The paper discusses a core idea that I argue has animated much HCI research since: the notion of scientific design spaces. To evaluate this concept, I disassemble the broader ‘picture of science’ in HCI and its role in constructing a disciplinary order for the increasingly diverse and overlapping research communities that contribute in some way to what we call ‘HCI’. In a word, I explore the problem about how we might reassess HCI’s disciplinarity. An external view of HCI’s disciplinary status could assume that it is secure. For instance, in CHI 2007’s opening address, Stuart Feldman (then president of the ACM) described the HCI research as “absolutely adherent to the classic scientific method”. But the picture from within HCI seems radically different. By reviewing broad discussions around HCI’s disciplinarity in this section, I intend to sketch a background for the state of human-computer interaction in HCI. Questions over HCI’s disciplinarity emerged early in its development. In 1987 ergonomist and HCI pioneer Brian Shackel asked during his INTERACT conference keynote whether “HCI was a discipline, or merely a meeting between other disciplines” [15]; a couple of years later, Long, Dowell, Carroll and others discussed what kind of discipline HCI might be described as [38, 11]. Although Carroll characterises this and his exchanges with Newell and Card as the “theory crisis” of the mid-1980s, one only need glance at a standard textbook to notice that HCI seems still to be routinely presented by an ambiguous constellation of overlapping disciplinary descriptors (e.g., interaction design, user experience, etc.). The term itself is also problematised, and HCI can be taken to perhaps subsume or compose these various related descriptors. For example, one position adopted by a key textbook — Interaction Design: Beyond Human-Computer Interaction — formulates HCI as a contributing academic discipline to a broader field of interaction design. In conclusion, in this paper I have sought to examine disciplinary anxieties in HCI through picking apart its ongoing relationship to ‘science’. This has meant identifying the idea of the scientific design space—an approach conceiving of designed artefacts as scientific objects, influenced by formative early applications of cognitive science to input devices. This significant approach to design seems to have subsequently configured much HCI research discourse, leading to discussions around scientific qualities of accumulation, replication, and generalisation. Yet, as I have tried to show, matters of science and scientific disciplinarity in this perspective are somewhat problematic conceptually and far from settled. Further, in spite of announcements over HCI’s various ‘turns’ and successive ‘waves’ of development, or even ‘paradigms’, I have contested that some of the key assumptions of HCI have been quite resilient to such apparent changes, even with the introduction of designerly perspectives to HCIhttp://www.cusabio.com/ that challenge Simon’s conceptualisation of design—indeed, there we also find similar debates played out around (design) science and (design) disciplinarity.