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Unit 10: Programming Techniques with Additional Instructions

development in computer science pointed to the same conclusion: The way forward for Notes
computing entailed understanding and better empowering users.
Finally human factors engineering, which had developed many techniques for empirical
analysis of human-system interactions in so-called control domains such as aviation and
manufacturing, came to see HCI as a valuable and challenging domain in which human
operators regularly exerted greater problem-solving discretion. These forces of need and
opportunity converged around 1980, focusing a huge burst of human energy, and creating a
highly visible interdisciplinary project.

From cabal to community
The original and abiding technical focus of HCI is on the concept of usability. This concept
was originally articulated naively in the slogan “easy to learn, easy to use”. The blunt simplicity
of this conceptualization gave HCI 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 HCI the concept of usability has been
reconstructed continually, and has become increasingly rich and intriguingly problematic.
Usability now often subsumes qualities like fun, well-being, collective efficacy, aesthetic
tension, enhanced creativity, support for human development, and many others. A more
dynamic view of usability is that of a programmatic objective that should continue to develop
as our ability to reach further toward it improves.
Although the original academic home for HCI 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 quickly expanded to encompass
visualization, information systems, collaborative systems, the system development process,
and many areas of design. HCI is taught now in many departments/faculties 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.
HCI research and practice draws upon and integrates all of these perspectives.
A result of this growth is that HCI 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 makes sense to regard HCI as a specialty of computer science;
HCI has grown to be broader, larger and much more diverse than computer science. It
expanded from individual and generic user behavior to include social and organizational
computing, creativity, and accessibility for the elderly, the cognitively impaired, and for all
people. It expanded from desktop office applications to include games, e-learning, e-commerce,
military systems, and process control. It expanded from early graphical user interfaces to
include myriad interaction techniques and devices, multi-modal interactions, and host of
emerging ubiquitous, handheld and context-aware interactions.
There is no unified concept of an HCI professional. In the 1980s, people often contrasts the
cognitive science side of HCI with the software tools and user interface side of HCI. The HCI
landscape is far more differentiated and complex now. HCI academic programs train many
different types of professionals now: user experience designers, interaction designers, user
interface designers, application designers, usability engineers, user interface developers,
application developers, technical communicators/online information designers, and more.
And indeed, many of the sub-communities of HCI are themselves quite diverse. For example,
ubiquitous computing (aka ubicomp) is subarea of HCI, but it is also a superordinate area
integrating several mutually diverse subareas (e.g., mobile computing, geo-spatial information
systems, in-vehicle systems, community informatics, distributed systems, handhelds, wearable
devices, ambient intelligence, sensor networks, and specialized views of usability evaluation,
programming tools and techniques, application infrastructures, etc.). The relationship between
ubiquitous computing and HCI is becoming paradigmatic: HCI is the name for a community
of communities.
Contd. ...

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