The field - Human Computer Interaction is changing bit by bit from the very beginning to what it is now. Susanne Bødker gave us some hints on how it is shifting from interface/usability to user experience in the paper “When second wave HCI meets third wave challenges”. It can be generally classified as three waves:
1st wave (~1980s), a wave of “User”:
Rigid | Guidelines | Cognitive emphasis
Unity of everything on the desktop | “User” vs “System”
Human factors | Ergonomics
Usability testing | Controlled experiments
As we can see it is too narrow.
2nd wave (~1990s), a wave of “Human”
Context(boundaries) | Workspace(in the expansive sense)
Distributed cognition | Activity theory
Participatory design | Contextual inquiry
Ethnomethodology | Design-as-science
Human vs User
Sure, it is too “work” and rationality focused.
3rd wave (~2000s), a wave of “Lifeworld”
Experience | Emotion | Context (loosely defined)
Leisure | Arts | Home | Life
Non-rational | Non-goal-oriented
Cultural studies | Design ethnography | Design-as-art
Might be a little bit artsy-fartsy.
A great example for 3rd wave will be Siftables on Ted
The challenge here is how we could “twist” and position those theories and knowledge from 2nd wave to better facilitate the development of 3rd wave. Might be that is what 4th wave should be, maybe not.
Take a minute and think about what 4th wave will be…
Referrence:
Bødker, S. (2006). When second wave hci meets third wave challenges. In NordiCHI ‘06: Proceedings of the 4th Nordic conference on Human-computer interaction, pages 1-8, New York, NY, USA. ACM Press.
The post would be even better if some examples were presented to illustrate the three waves respectively.
I have added one example to 3rd wave HCI, it is actually pretty popular recently.
For 1st and 2nd wave, I cannot come up with a particular example right now, will update it once I recall any.
I didn’t quite get the difference between 1 and 2, for example the workspace design is a traditional topic of ergonomics.
Personally I would like to break the HCI into:
1. HCI in isolated tasks
This means most of the old-school HCI studies, usability, workspace design, task analysis, cognitive walkthrough, experiment, etc.
2. Contextual HCI
Siftables is a great example of this category, tasks are connected in scenarios, computing becomes ubiquitous and on-the-cloud.
3. Social HCI
HCI in a bigger scale, support human-computer and human-human interaction.
I think the contextual HCI will be the next big thing. When computational power and bandwidth become commodities, the question is no longer: how to get things done, but: how to get things done smartly. By smart I mean personal and contextual. Example: Imagine knowing you are from Sichuan, Google Map will put Sichuan style restaurant on the top of local search results. It will be like recommendation from real human.
Just my two cents.
For the difference of first 2 waves, my understanding is that the first wave is just focusing on one-to-one (user-to-computer), while the 2nd wave extended a little bit and started to look at (well-defined) context of human. But it is still very rationality focused.
似乎CMU有自己的归类法。对于第四代，有很多例子，contextual awareness, human computation, humanity-focused design都满有市场。
很有趣。似乎CMU这边把交互设计从亚里士多德就开始分了，artsy的东西从他的poetics开始算起，这大概应该叫第0代，然后有大量关于john Dewey，Bergson，然后就是大篇幅的Rittles, Christopher Alexander和Herbert Simon.
看来CMU Design School果然是非常艺术！我前几天刚看一篇paper用Christopher Alexander的建筑设计模式来类比机器人social interaction的模式，感叹大师就是大师！
所以果然交互设计和HCI有差。
我觉得CMU完全不艺术，我们完全是以用户研究起始的USER-CENTERED DESIGN。我倒是希望更艺术一点。事实上，太不艺术了，有点无聊。
CMU的D School也是focus on UCD的吗，本以为只有HCII是。