Challenges and Opportunities for HCI Design and ResearchJim Hollan, Distributed Cognition and HCI Lab

Department of Cognitive Science, UCSD http://hci.ucsd.edu

Dynapad: Multiscale Personal Information Environments

Automation in Commercial Aircraft Ethnography of Driving Paper Augmented Digital DocumentsNegotiated AccessActive Campus Rufae: Augmented EnvironmentsDigital Ethnography WorkbenchEmbodied Interaction and Gesture

hollan@cogsci.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 Researchinvolving 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 activitiesThe 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?