CHI Ten Year View:
Creating and Sustaining Common Ground

Preparatory Analysis

CURRENT SITUATION

In their position papers, workshop participants make a number of observations about the current situation of the CHI field and community:

• The main organizing concept for the field today seems to be the division of CHI work into research and practice (Hansen, Novick)
• Across the field as a whole, there has been a growing shift in emphasis away from research in favor of development (Perez-Quinones, Wharton)

Quote from Wharton: "The state of the CHI community is rapidly changing. Up until the past few years, HCI specialists were able to couple research and product development work quite easily. Recently, however, within industry there has been a strong push to move away from research and to instead emphasize quicker cycle times in the product development lifecycle. This means that basic and even applied research work must be undertaken by those in an academic setting."

• In recent years we have seen a stagnation of CHI theory (Leventhal, Novick)
• Developers continue to produce interfaces uniformed by CHI (Perez-Quinones)

Quote from Mateas: "HCI's strongly multi-disciplinary nature leads to a lack of unity and shared understanding. This lack of unity contributes to HCI's marginalization."

• New technologies are providing better support for group work (MacLean, Tweedie)
• There is increasing focus on work and work setting (MacLean)

Quote from MacLean: "I believe that the most radical insights have come from the realisation that the intrinsic nature of work in this kind of setting relies on ad hoc and opportunistic behaviour, and more importantly from beginning to develop systems solutions which address these issues head on. This is particularly challenging as it appears to be in direct conflict with the traditional view of computers as embodying rigid and formal specifications of behavior."

TRENDS

"Trends" are clearly existing, ongoing changes in society, politics, economics, and technology. Workshop participants identified several trends that may affect CHI directly or indirectly:

Social, political and economic trends that may affect the future of CHI:

• Increasing differentials between rich and poor (Hansen, Karat)
• Corporate downsizing and out-sourcing of work (Marshall, Wharton)
• Increasing environmental concerns (Marshall, Wharton)
• Increasing concern with process in businesses and other mission-centered organizations (Leventhal, MacLean)
• Transformation of academe toward centers, away from tenure, and into new funding models (Leventhal, Marshall, Novick)

Trends involving the relationship between technology and society:

• Computers/communications as a part of everyday life (Karat, Tweedie)
• Rapid growth of Internet and WWW (Wharton)
• Stronger public policies regarding use of computer/communications technology

Trends directly relating to CHI:

• Everyday users designing interfaces (Leventhal, Wharton)
• Increasing importance of artistic creativity in design (Karat, Novick, Wharton)
• Split between design and evaluation (Karat)

DRIVERS

"Drivers" are possible future events or trends that cannot be predicted with certainty or in detail, but would be likely to have a significant impact on the CHI field and community.

Workshop participants predict various technology developments that will have an impact on the field of CHI over the next ten years:

• Wireless, digital, ubiquitous computing & communications (MacLean, Perez-Quinones, Wharton)
• Personal information devices (MacLean, Perez-Quinones, Wharton)
• Instrumented spaces (Gorny, MacLean)
• Embedded systems (Gorny, Novick)
• Disappearance of the "computer" (Gorny)
• Client-side languages (i.e., Java) (Perez-Quinones, Wharton)
• Software by components (Novick, Perez-Quinones)
• Powerful, ubiquitous authoring tools (Leventhal, Wharton)
• Multimodal interaction
• Continued development of new interaction techniques and technologies (all)

Workshop participants also see the nature of CHI work and the role of CHI professionals as changing in some way over the next ten years:

• The knowledge base of CHI will expand and the complexity of the field will increase (Karat, Leventhal, Marshall, Novick, MacLean, Perez-Quinones)
• The continuing evolution of the field of CHI (which has already led to a shift in emphasis from the lone user to workgroups) will lead to a shift of emphasis from workgroups to organizations (MacLean)
• The desktop as metaphor will become inadequate (MacLean)
• It will become increasingly important for interface design to be informed by domain knowledge (Gorny, Mateas, Wharton)

Quote from Gorny: "The special purpose devices with invisible computers inside are designed according to the users' needs of the respective application domain and not, as often today, with the goal to satisfy a 'generalized user'."

• CHI professionals will evolve into domain specialists or DHI (Device-Human Interaction) professionals (Gorny)
• There will be a growing differentiation between CHI specialists and CHI generalists (Marshall)
• The applications CHI professionals work on will be designed for a more diverse population -- one that is international and broader in socio-economic range (Hansen, Mateas, Wharton)
• CHI professionals will become involved in the creation of corporate strategy and public policy (Karat, Marshall, Mateas)
• CHI professionals will play an increasingly important role as "translators" -- i.e. facilitators of communication between the various constituencies who are involved in or have some stake in the development of products and the utilization of technology (Karat, Mateas, Tweedie)

Workshop participants have a variety of ideas about the way CHI field will react to or be impacted by new technology and changing roles:

• Changes in technology will be taken in stride (Karat)

Quote from Leventhal: "CHI as a domain will continue to mature, with the development of stable and truly usable design methodologies, in much the same way that software engineering did in the 1970's and 1980's."

• There will be a decreased demand for Ph.D.s (Marshall, Novick)
• There will be an increased demand for continuing education (Marshall)
• CHI professionals will develop a "guild mentality" (Novick)
• Innovation will occur in an entertainment context in which traditional CHI professionals play no role (Novick)

Additional drivers predicted by workshop participants:

• Design process as unifying common ground (Marshall, Mateas)
• Need for greater emphasis on ethics (Karat, Perez-Quinones)
• Increased emphasis on educational applications (Karat, Leventhal, Marshall)
• Increase in measurability of subjective aspects of interaction (Hansen)
• Increase in accessibility of multimedia interaction to general population (Hansen)
• Increased emphasis on standards (Leventhal, Novick, Perez-Quinones)

©Copyright 1996 Catherine R. Marshall and David G. Novick