CHI Ten Year View:
Creating and Sustaining Common Ground
Background Analysis
Prior to the workshop, each participant prepared a position paper. In a preparatory analysis, the
organizers created a digest of participants' views on current situation, trends and drivers. During the
first workshop activity, participants reviewed and refined this digest. The results of this background
analysis are excerpted here:
Workshop participants' observations about the current situation of the CHI field and community:
- Division of CHI work into research and practice
- Shift away from research toward development
- Stagnation of CHI theory
- Developers still produce interfaces uninformed by CHI
- Multi-disciplinarity leads disunity and marginalization
- New technologies better support group work
- Increasing focus on work and work setting
Workshop participants' observations about clearly existing, ongoing changes in society, politics,
economics, and technology that may affect CHI directly or indirectly:
- Increasing differentials between rich and poor
- Corporate downsizing and out-sourcing of work
- Increasing environmental concerns
- Increasing concern with process
- Academe moving toward centers, away from tenure, into new funding models
- Computers/communications as part of everyday life
- Rapid growth of Internet and WWW
- Everyday users designing interfaces
- Increasing importance of artistic creativity in design
Workshop participants' observations about 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:
- Wireless, digital, ubiquitous computing/communications
- Software by components
- Increased emphasis on standards
- Powerful, ubiquitous authoring tools
- Multimodal interaction; emphasis on input modalities
- More new interaction techniques and technologies
- Knowledge base of CHI will expand and the complexity of the field will increase
- Growing differentiation between CHI specialists and CHI generalists
- 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
©Copyright 1996 Catherine R. Marshall and David G. Novick