Challenges and Opportunities for HCI Design and Research Jim Hollan, Distributed Cognition and HCI Lab Department of Cognitive Science, UCSD

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Challenges and Opportunities for HCI Design and
ResearchJim Hollan, Distributed Cognition and
HCI LabDepartment of Cognitive Science, UCSD
http//hci.ucsd.edu
hollan_at_cogsci.ucsd.edu

• 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

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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

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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

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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?