Discussion Define Human Computer Interaction in your own words and discuss how Human Computer Interaction has

evolved over time It is the study of how people interact with computers and to what extent computers are or are not developed for successful interaction with human beings. It is also a discipline concerned with the study, design, construction and implementation of human-centric interactive computer systems. A user interface, such as a GUI, is how a human interacts with a computer, and H I goes beyond designing screens and menus that are easier to use and studies the reasoning behind building specific functionality into computers and the long-term effects that systems will have on humans. It is a very broad discipline that encompasses different specialties with different concerns regarding computer development! computer science is concerned with the application design and engineering of the human interfaces" sociology and anthropology are concerned with the interactions between technology, wor# and organi$ation and the way that human systems and technical systems mutually adapt to each other" ergonomics is concerned with the safety of computer systems and the safe limits of human cognition and sensation" psychology is concerned with the cognitive processes of humans and the behavior of users" linguistics is concerned with the development of human and machine languages and the relationship between the two. Human-computer interaction %H I& is an area of research and practice that emerged in the early '()*s, initially as a specialty area in computer science embracing cognitive science and human factors engineering. H I has expanded rapidly and steadily for three decades, attracting professionals from many other disciplines and incorporating diverse concepts and approaches. +o a considerable extent, H I now aggregates a collection of semiautonomous fields of research and practice in human-centered informatics. However, the continuing synthesis of disparate conceptions and approaches to science and practice in H I has produced a dramatic example of how different epistemologies and paradigms can be reconciled and integrated in a vibrant and productive intellectual pro,ect. Until the late '(-*s, the only humans who interacted with computers were information technology professionals and dedicated hobbyists. +his changed disruptively with the emergence of personal computing in the later '(-*s. .ersonal computing, including both personal software %productivity applications, such as text editors and spreadsheets, and interactive computer games& and personal computer platforms %operating systems, programming languages, and hardware&, made everyone in the world a potential computer user, and vividly highlighted the deficiencies of computers with respect to usability for those who wanted to use computers as tools. +he challenge of personal computing became manifest at an opportune time. +he broad pro,ect of cognitive science, which incorporated cognitive psychology, artificial intelligence, linguistics, cognitive anthropology, and the philosophy of mind, had formed at the end of the '(-*s. .art of the programme of cognitive science was to articulate

systematic and scientifically informed applications to be #nown as /cognitive engineering/. +hus, at ,ust the point when personal computing presented the practical need for H I, cognitive science presented people, concepts, s#ills, and a vision for addressing such needs through an ambitious synthesis of science and engineering. H I was one of the first examples of cognitive engineering.

+his was facilitated by analogous developments in engineering and design areas ad,acent to H I, and in fact often overlapping H I, notably human factors engineering and documentation development. Human factors had developed empirical and tas#-analytic techni0ues for evaluating human-system interactions in domains such as aviation and manufacturing, and was moving to address interactive system contexts in which human operators regularly exerted greater problem-solving discretion. 1ocumentation development was moving beyond its traditional role of producing systematic technical descriptions toward a cognitive approach incorporating theories of writing, reading, and media, with empirical user testing. 1ocuments and other information needed to be usable also. 2ther historically fortuitous developments contributed to the establishment of H I. 3oftware engineering, mired in unmanageable software complexity in the '(-*s %the 4software crisis5&, was starting to focus on nonfunctional re0uirements, including usability and maintainability, and on empirical software development processes that relied heavily on iterative prototyping and empirical testing. omputer graphics and information retrieval had emerged in the '(-*s, and rapidly came to recogni$e that interactive systems were the #ey to progressing beyond early achievements. All these threads of development in computer science pointed to the same conclusion! +he way forward for computing entailed understanding and better empowering users. +hese diverse forces of need and opportunity converged around '()*, focusing a huge burst of human energy, and creating a highly visible interdisciplinary pro,ect. From cabal to community +he original and abiding technical focus of H I was and is the concept of usability. +his concept was originally articulated somewhat naively in the slogan /easy to learn, easy to use/. +he blunt simplicity of this conceptuali$ation gave H I an edgy and prominent identity in computing. It served to hold the field together, and to help it influence computer science and technology development more broadly and effectively. However, inside H I the concept of usability has been re-articulated and reconstructed almost continually, and has become increasingly rich and intriguingly problematic. Usability now often subsumes 0ualities li#e fun, well being, collective efficacy, aesthetic tension, enhanced creativity, flow, support for human development, and others. A more dynamic view of usability is one of a programmatic ob,ective that should and will continue to develop as our ability to reach further toward it improves.

Although the original academic home for H I was computer science, and its original focus was on personal productivity applications, mainly text editing and spreadsheets, the field has constantly diversified and outgrown all boundaries. It 0uic#ly expanded to encompass visuali$ation, information systems, collaborative systems, the system development process, and many areas of design. H I is taught now in many departments6faculties that address information technology, including psychology, design, communication studies, cognitive science, information science, science and technology studies, geographical sciences, management information systems, and industrial, manufacturing, and systems engineering. H I research and practice draws upon and integrates all of these perspectives. A result of this growth is that H I is now less singularly focused with respect to core concepts and methods, problem areas and assumptions about infrastructures, applications, and types of users. Indeed, it no longer ma#es sense to regard H I as a specialty of computer science" H I has grown to be broader, larger and much more diverse than computer science itself. H I expanded from its initial focus on individual and generic user behavior to include social and organi$ational computing, accessibility for the elderly, the cognitively and physically impaired, and for all people, and for the widest possible spectrum of human experiences and activities. It expanded from des#top office applications to include games, learning and education, commerce, health and medical applications, emergency planning and response, and systems to support collaboration and community. It expanded from early graphical user interfaces to include myriad interaction techni0ues and devices, multi-modal interactions, tool support for modelbased user interface specification, and a host of emerging ubi0uitous, handheld and context-aware interactions. +here is no unified concept of an H I professional. In the '()*s, the cognitive science side of H I was sometimes contrasted with the software tools and user interface side of H I. +he landscape of core H I concepts and s#ills is far more differentiated and complex now. H I academic programs train many different types of professionals! user experience designers, interaction designers, user interface designers, application designers, usability engineers, user interface developers, application developers, technical communicators6online information designers, and more. And indeed, many of the subcommunities of H I are themselves 0uite diverse. 7or example, ubi0uitous computing %a#a ubicomp& is subarea of H I, but it is also a superordinate area integrating several distinguishable subareas, for example mobile computing, geo-spatial information systems, in-vehicle systems, community informatics, distributed systems, handhelds, wearable devices, ambient intelligence, sensor networ#s, and speciali$ed views of usability evaluation, programming tools and techni0ues, and application infrastructures. +he relationship between ubi0uitous computing and H I is paradigmatic! H I is the name for a community of communities. Indeed, the principle that H I is a community of communities is now a point of definition codified, for example, in the organi$ation of ma,or H I conferences and ,ournals. +he integrating element across H I communities continues to be a close lin#age of critical analysis of usability, broadly understood, with development of novel

technology and applications. +his is the defining identity commitment of the H I community. It has allowed H I to successfully cultivate respect for the diversity of s#ills and concepts that underlie innovative technology development, and to regularly transcend disciplinary obstacles. In the early '()*s, H I was a small and focused specialty area. It was a cabal trying to establish what was then a heretical view of computing. +oday, H I is a vast and multifaceted community, bound by the evolving concept of usability, and the integrating commitment to value human activity and experience as the primary driver in technology. Beyond the desktop Given the contemporary shape of H I, it is important to remember that its origins are personal productivity interactions bound to the des#top, such as word processing and spreadsheets. Indeed, one of biggest design ideas of the early '()*s was the so-called messy des# metaphor, populari$ed by the Apple 8acintosh! 7iles and folders were displayed as icons that could be, and were scattered around the display surface. +he messy des#top was a perfect incubator for the developing paradigm of graphical user interfaces. .erhaps it wasn9t 0uite as easy to learn and easy to use as claimed, but people everywhere were soon double clic#ing, dragging windows and icons around their displays, and losing trac# of things on their des#top interfaces ,ust as they did on their physical des#tops. It was surely a star# contrast to the immediately prior teletype metaphor of Unix, in which all interactions were accomplished by typing commands. :ven though it can definitely be argued that the des#top metaphor was superficial, or perhaps under-exploited as a design paradigm, it captured imaginations of designers and the public. +hese were new possibilities for many people in '()*, pundits speculated about how they might change office wor#. Indeed, the tsunami of des#top designs challenged, sometimes threatened the expertise and wor# practices of office wor#ers. +oday they are in the cultural bac#ground. hildren learn these concepts and s#ills routinely. As H I developed, it moved beyond the des#top in three distinct senses. 7irst, the des#top metaphor proved to be more limited than it first seemed. It9s fine to directly represent a couple do$en digital ob,ects as icons, but this approach 0uic#ly leads to clutter, and is not very useful for people with thousands of personal files and folders. +hrough the mid-'((*s, H I professionals and everyone else reali$ed that search is a more fundamental paradigm than browsing for finding things in a user interface. Ironically though, when early ;orld ;ide ;eb pages emerged in the mid-'((*s, they not only dropped the messy des#top metaphor, but for the most part dropped graphical interactions entirely. And still they were seen as a brea#through in usability %of course, the direct contrast was to Unix-style tools li#e ftp and telnet&. +he design approach of displaying and directly interacting with data ob,ects as icons has not disappeared, but it is no longer a hegemonic design concept. +he second sense in which H I moved beyond the des#top was through the growing influence of the Internet on computing and on society. 3tarting in the mid-'()*s, email emerged as one of the most important H I applications, but ironically, email made

computers and networ#s into communication channels" people were not interacting with computers, they were interacting with other people through computers. +ools and applications to support collaborative activity now include instant messaging, wi#is, blogs, online forums, social networ#ing, social boo#mar#ing and tagging services, media spaces and other collaborative wor#spaces, recommender and collaborative filtering systems, and a wide variety of online groups and communities. <ew paradigms and mechanisms for collective activity have emerged including online auctions, reputation systems, soft sensors, and crowd sourcing. +his area of H I, now often called social computing, is one of the most rapidly developing. +he third way that H I moved beyond the des#top was through the continual, and occasionally explosive diversification in the ecology of computing devices. =efore des#top applications were consolidated, new #inds of device contexts emerged, notably laptops, which began to appear in the early '()*s, and handhelds, which began to appear in the mid-'()*s. 2ne frontier today is ubi0uitous computing! +he pervasive incorporation of computing into human habitats > cars, home appliances, furniture, clothing, and so forth. 1es#top computing is still very important, though the des#top habitat has been transformed by the wide use of laptops. +o a considerable extent, the des#top itself has moved off the des#top. omputing moved off the des#top to be everywhere all the time. omputers are in phones, cars, meeting rooms, and coffee shops. +he focus of H I has moved beyond the des#top, and its focus will continue to move. H I is a technology area, and it is ineluctably driven to frontiers of technology and application possibility. +he special value and contribution of H I is that it will investigate, develop, and harness those new areas of possibility not merely as technologies or designs, but as means for enhancing human activity and experience. The task-artifact cycle +he movement of H I off the des#top is a large-scale example of a pattern of technology development that is replicated throughout H I at many levels of analysis. H I addresses the dynamic co-evolution of the activities people engage in and experience, and the artifacts > such as interactive tools and environments > that mediate those activities. H I is about understanding and critically evaluating the interactive technologies people use and experience. =ut it is also about how those interactions evolve as people appropriate technologies, as their expectations, concepts and s#ills develop, and as they articulate new needs, new interests, and new visions and agendas for interactive technology. ?eciprocally, H I is about understanding contemporary human practices and aspirations, including how those activities are embodied, elaborated, but also perhaps limited by current infrastructures and tools. H I is about understanding practices and activity specifically as re0uirements and design possibilities envisioning and bringing into being

new technology, new tools and environments. It is about exploring design spaces, and reali$ing new systems and devices through the co-evolution of activity and artifacts, the tas#-artifact cycle. Human activities implicitly articulate needs, preferences and design visions. Artifacts are designed in response, but inevitably do more than merely respond. +hrough the course of their adoption and appropriation, new designs provide new possibilities for action and interaction. Ultimately, this activity articulates further human needs, preferences, and design visions. Understanding H I as inscribed in a co-evolution of activity and technological artifacts is useful. 8ost simply, it reminds us what H I is li#e, that all of the infrastructure of H I, including its concepts, methods, focal problems, and stirring successes will always be in flux. 8oreover, because the co-evolution of activity and artifacts is shaped by a cascade of contingent initiatives across a diverse collection of actors, there is no reason to expect H I to be convergent, or predictable. +his is not to say progress in H I is random or arbitrary, ,ust that it is more li#e world history than it is li#e physics. 2ne could see this 0uite optimistically! Individual and collective initiative shapes what H I is, but not the laws of physics. A second implication of the tas#-artifact cycle is that continual exploration of new applications and application domains, new designs and design paradigms, new experiences, and new activities should remain highly pri$ed in H I. ;e may have the sense that we #now where we are going today, but given the apparent rate of co-evolution in activity and artifacts, our effective loo#-ahead is probably less than we thin#. 8oreover, since we are in effect constructing a future tra,ectory, and not ,ust finding it, the cost of missteps is high. +he co-evolution of activity and artifacts evidences strong hysteresis, that is to say, effects of past co-evolutionary ad,ustments persist far into the future. 7or example, many people struggle every day with operating systems and core productivity applications whose designs were evolutionary reactions to misanalyses from two or more decades ago. 2f course, it is impossible to always be right with respect to values and criteria that will emerge and coalesce in the future, but we should at least be mindful that very conse0uential missteps are possible. +he remedy is to consider many alternatives at every point in the progression. It is vitally important to have lots of wor# exploring possible experiences and activities, for example, on design and experience probes and prototypes. If we focus too strongly on the affordances of currently embodied technology we are too easily and uncritically accepting constraints that will limit contemporary H I as well as all future tra,ectories. H I is not fundamentally about the laws of nature. ?ather, it manages innovation to ensure that human values and human priorities are advanced, and not diminished through new technology. +his is what created H I" this is what led H I off the des#top" it will continue to lead H I to new regions of technology-mediated human possibility. +his is why usability is an open-ended concept, and can never be reduced to a fixed chec#list.

A caldron of theory +he contingent tra,ectory of H I as a pro,ect in transforming human activity and experience through design has nonetheless remained closely integrated with the application and development of theory in the social and cognitive sciences. :ven though, and to some extent because the technologies and human activities at issue in H I are continually co-evolving, the domain has served as a laboratory and incubator for theory. +he origin of H I as an early case study in cognitive engineering had an imprinting effect on the character of the endeavor. 7rom the very start, the models, theories and framewor#s developed and used in H I were pursued as contributions to science! H I has enriched every theory it has appropriated. 7or example, the G283 %Goals, 2perations, 8ethods, 3election rules& model, the earliest native theory in H I, was a more comprehensive cognitive model than had been attempted elsewhere in cognitive science and engineering" the model human processor included simple aspects of perception, attention, short-term memory operations, planning, and motor behavior in a single model. =ut G283 was also a practical tool, articulating the dual criteria of scientific contribution plus engineering and design efficacy that has become the culture of theory and application in H I. +he focus of theory development and application has moved throughout the history of H I, as the focus of the co-evolution of activities and artifacts has moved.@ +hus, the early information processing-based psychological theories, li#e G283, were employed to model the cognition and behavior of individuals interacting with #eyboards, simple displays, and pointing devices. +his initial conception of H I theory was broadened as interactions became more varied and applications became richer. 7or example, perceptual theories were marshaled to explain how ob,ects are recogni$ed in a graphical display, mental model theories were appropriated to explain the role of concepts > li#e the messy des#top metaphor > in shaping interactions, active user theories were developed to explain how and why users learn and ma#ing sense of interactions. In each case, however, these elaborations were both scientific advances and bases for better tools and design practices. +his dialectic of theory and application has continued in H I. It is easy to identify a do$en or so ma,or currents of theory, which themselves can by grouped %roughly& into three eras! theories that view human-computer interaction as information processing, theories that view interaction as the initiative of agents pursuing pro,ects, and theories that view interaction as socially and materially embedded in rich contexts. +o some extent, the se0uence of theories can be understood as a convergence of scientific opportunity and application need! odifying and using relatively austere models made it clear what richer views of people and interaction could be articulated and what they could contribute" at the same time, personal devices became portals for interaction in the social and physical world, re0uiring richer theoretical framewor#s for analysis and design. +hrough the past three decades, a series of theoretical paradigms emerged to address the expanding ambitions of H I research, design, and product development. 3uccessive

theories both challenged and enriched prior conception of people and interaction. All of these theories are still relevant and still in use today in H I. +he se0uence of theories and eras is of course somewhat ideali$ed. .eople still wor# on G283 models" indeed, all of the ma,or models, theories and framewor#s that ever were employed in H I are still in current use. Indeed, they continue to develop as the context of the field develops. G283 today is more a niche model than a paradigm for H I, but has recently been applied in research on smart phone designs and human-robot interactions. +he challenge of integrating, or at least better coordinating descriptive and explanatory science goals with prescriptive and constructive design goals is abiding in H I. +here are at least three ongoing directions > traditional application of ever-broader and deeper basic theories, development of local, sometimes domain dependent proto-theories within particular design domains, and the use of design rationale as a mediating level of description between basic science and design practice.

The Evolution of Human-Computer Interaction

'. 3creen and Aeyboard, +ext-bases UI computers.

+his is the very first generation of this #ind of machines, which is familiar by most people. +hrough monitors, people can read the outputs from computers. +he input is captured by #eyboards, which is the only way. And the 4 omputers5 act in the middle to carry out calculation or simply do the tas#s given. 8aybe due to the 4ugly5 appearance, people hardly treat it as a nice 4friend5 rather than a machine. B. 8ouse, GUI computers.

;e must admit it is a great invention to have 4mouse5 in humans9 history. ;hat accompanies that is the 4lovely5 Graphical User Interface. =y then, we can say computers have really put on a nice 4mas#5 to act as humans9 friend. And that is also why it becomes accepted and loved by the population. +his is also when computers really too# off as a popular technology and came into our daily life. C. +ouch 3creen, .ortable devices.

3teve Dobs once said, we humans were born with the finest tools to interact with our computers, that was our hands, our fingers. +ouch screens really empower people to use our fingers to directly communicate with computers in the very native way. =y doing this, the interaction with computers has been significantly simplified. It is not hard to imagine a E-year-old #id can use computers through this fantastic interface. E. Foice-control, general computers.

I believe this is an emerging trend for Human- omputer Interaction with the technology advancement in Artificial Intelligence and Information ?etrieval. <ow, computers have totally become a 4person5. He can ,ust listen to your voice, interpret and understand it, then act accordingly. 1on9t you thin# it is ama$ing when machines can listen and spea#@ ?ef! http!66www.interactiondesign.org6encyclopedia6humanGcomputerGinteractionGhci.html http!66csCBE*group*-.wordpress.com6B*'B6*'6C*6the-evolution-of-human-computerinteraction6