Challenges and Opportunities for HCI Design and Research
Jim Hollan, Distributed Cognition and HCI Lab
hollan@cogsci.ucsd.edu
Department of Cognitive Science, UCSD
Dynapad: Multiscale Personal
Information Environments
Automation in Commercial Aircraft
Ethnography of Driving
Paper Augmented Digital Documents
Negotiated Access
Active Campus
Rufae: Augmented Environments
Digital Ethnography Workbench
Embodied Interaction and Gesture
http://hci.ucsd.edu
Challenges
The miniaturization, increasing power, and decreasing cost of
commodity computing devices makes possible wide-scale
application and further imbuing of the world with computation
•
The monolithic "computer" is being unbundled into
fragmentary components
•
These components, and the diverse applications they
enable, are now reemerging coalesced in a multitude of
rapidly evolving forms
ranging from cell phones and other appliance-like devices
to novel embeddings in an expanding array of everyday objects and in
vast communication and sensor networks
•
Enormous New Challenges for HCI Design and Research
involving not only complex theoretical and methodological issues of
how to design effective computationally-based representations in
increasing complex networked environments
but also confront complex social, cultural, and political issues such as
those of privacy, contol of attention, and ownership of information
As with many challenges there
are also opportunities
•
Changing view of cognition: from a property of isolated
individuals to a property of larger social and technical
systems
•
The boundary between the physical and digital is
increasingly permeable and computation is becoming
ubiquitous
•
Same forces leading to a ubiquitous computing future
are also changing the nature and richness of data we can
collect about human activities
The ubiquity of computing and a new generation of inexpensive digital recording
devices may revolutionize the study of human activity, extend it to situations
that have not typically been accessible, and enable multiscale examination
of the fine detail of action captured in meaningful settings.
Need an open software infrastructure to support capture of rich activity data,
speed and improve analysis, and facilitate sharing with the larger research
community.
•
In the history of science, the appearance of new
technologies for collecting or analyzing data frequently
has spawned rapid scientific advancement
Final Thought
• HCI owes a deep intellectual debt to Parc
and the development of the Alto.
• Is it not time for one (or more) similarly
ambitious projects?
• Might not a major limitation in building a
new generation of HCI be that we are
building layers on top of systems designed
with virtually no conception of the services
needed today?