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HCI remixed : reflections on works that have influenced the HCI community
Erickson T., McDonald D., The MIT Press, 2008. 344 pp. Type: Book (9780262050883)
Date Reviewed: Sep 10 2008

This book is an interesting, yet surprising read. It has nothing to do with the usual edited book, and talks about real and experiential things. On the other hand, the book brings together such an assortment of experiences that the reader can easily get lost. Although the editors have tried to group the learning experiences, some sections are far from self-explanatory.

The editors asked a number of researchers from academia and practitioners from industry to select a paper, book, or video, at least ten years old, that had caused a change of approach, method, or material, or had transformed their human-computer interaction (HCI) related personal, professional, or experiential life. These old things have played a leading role in shaping the personality and trajectory of the field, and we have a lot to learn from their wisdom today. This idea grew into 51 essays, spread across the book’s eight sections. The book is one big essay.

Section 1, “Big Ideas,” includes five essays describing systems designed by HCI pioneers. These systems employed key concepts and had a big impact on those who “experienced them”: Pulfer’s National Research Council music machine, Sutherland’s SketchPad system for graphical communication of people, Licklider’s vision for symbiotic communication of people and computers, and Engelbart’s oNLine System (NLS) demo video.

Section 2, “Influential Systems,” contains five essays tracking the evolution of HCI from graphical user interface (GUI) interaction to ubiquitous systems. The first essay addresses the impact of Pygmalion, the system that introduced the notion of icons and programming by demonstration into system interaction. It is followed by two reflections on the Star functional specification of the user interface for the first Xerox Star workstation that established the “desktop” metaphor. The last two essays deal with ubiquitous computing.

The seven essays in Section 3, “Large Groups, Loosely Joined,” are driven by macro-level thinking, that is, the large team, organization, and Web level of people interacting. Some of the themes tackled are experiences with computer-mediated communication, and how ideas travel through cultures and organizations. The essay about Jacobs [1] shows how interactive systems have changed everyday modes of communication.

Section 4, “Groups in the Wild,” contains seven essays where thinking flows at the micro level, that is, at the level of small, real teams involved in doing ordinary things in everyday settings. These reflections focus on frameworks for understanding groups and group processes, including the systems that support them. These essays consider the theory and approaches of social psychology that are researching team building, and research in computer-supported cooperative work, claiming that design has to consider cultural, social, organizational, and personnel-related issues.

Section 5, “Reflective Practitioners,” examines how reflective practitioners adapt to a computerized society, where the continual adoption of new technologies (for voice, graphics, animation, video, and information spaces) forces existing technologies into obsolescence. The first essay describes the experiments run to evaluate a listening typewriter simulated using Gould and colleagues’ “Wizard of Oz” technique. The second essay discusses an experience with early interactive artwork by Galloway and Rabinowitz, called Hole in Space. The other five essays deal with topics ranging from the realm of visual design to Furnas’ “fisheye view” [2].

Section 6, “There’s More to Design,” contains six essays. All of these essays show some broader context--organizations, histories, and cultures--necessarily embedding design. The first essay reflects on the fact that people are still the least-formalized factor in people-focused design processes. Another is on the “systemic” design methodology and contextual inquiry for producing usable interactive systems. The last essay focuses on Munford and Weir’s sociotechnical design systems. All of these essays are a reminder of Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, where HCI is “of the people, by the people, and for the people.”

The seven essays in Section 7, “Tacking and Jibbling,” discover the impact that a new idea can have on peoples’ lives, to the point of causing a personal or professional move, or a change of problem-solving approach, research focus, or viewpoint. These essays deal with topics ranging from gathering evidence from qualitative experimentation, to people and team management based on DeMarco and Lister’s work [3]. Two essays end the section by asking, “What do engineers know and how do they know it?” and “Why is interaction more powerful than algorithms?”

Section 8, “Seeking Common Ground,” comprises eight essays. These essays discuss on the body of knowledge that most of the HCI community agrees on. These foundations include the modeling approach, the theory of mental models, Fitts’ law, and the cognitive theories imported into HCI.

This is not a book to read from cover to cover. Readers should hunt for things that look useful; fish out, from what transformed others, the few things that can make a personal difference; and then actively seek out the source that impacted the essayist.

Reviewer:  Silvia Teresita Acuqa Review #: CR136046 (0907-0633)
1) Jacobs, J. The death and life of great American cities. Random House, New York, NY, 1961.
2) Furnas, G. The fisheye view: new look at structured files. Bell Laboratories technical memorandum, #81-11221-9, 1981.
3) DeMarco, T.; Lister, T. Peopleware : productive projects and teams (2nd ed.). Dorset House Pub., New York, NY, 1999.
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