Invited Talk: Stu Card, Interaction Science in the Age of Makers and Instructables -
Special EventsAbstract » Human-Computer Interaction now is almost a different discipline than at the time of the first CHI conference. The field has moved from command-line interfaces for time-sharing to gesture interfaces for brain wave sleep monitors on your telephone. As Hal Varian has pointed out, we are in one of those unusual combinatorial periods in history where technology offers us a rich set of recombinable components that have been perfected but not yet incorporated into the fabric of society. Furthermore, significant innovations can now be done by smaller teams at more rapid rates and lower cost than before. In fact, the technology has allowed the rise of a digital culture of DIY hobbyists, exemplified by the Maker, Instructables, and Quantified Self Movements, who emphasize exploring the newly possible and just-in-time self-education, There are at least two interesting implications for HCI, I think. First is that we are in a new golden age for HCI, like the heady days when the GUI was being invented. New I/O devices are needed, new major interaction paradigms are possible, and CHI conferences should become more interesting. Second, the state of current technology and the spirit of the Maker Movement suggest a means for making progress on one of HCI’s oldest structural problems: how to ground the field, accelerate its progress, and make it cumulative by fashioning theories and incorporating them into practice. It is this latter point on which I wish to dwell. In this talk, I will attempt to sketch out, in the spirit of the times, what an interaction science for HCI could look like, how it might be incorporated into practice, and how it might be taught.
BIO: Stuart Card works on the theory and design of human machine systems. Until his retirement, he was a Senior Research Fellow at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center and head of its User Interface Research group. His study of input devices led to the Fitts's Law characterization of the mouse and was a major factor leading to the mouse's commercial introduction by Xerox. His group developed theoretical characterizations of human-machine interaction, including the Model Human Processor, the GOMS theory of user interaction, information foraging theory, theories of the sensemaking process of knowledge aggregation, developments in information visualization, and statistical characterizations of Internet use. The work of his group has resulted in a dozen Xerox products and contributed to the founding of three software companies,
Card is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and the recipient of the 2007 Bower Award and Prize for Achievement in Science for fundamental contributions of the fields of human-computer interaction and information visualization. He is an ACM Fellow, the recipient of the ACM Computer-Human Interaction Lifetime Achievement Award, IEEE VGTC Visualization Career Award, and a member of the CHI-Academy. Card received an A.B. degree in physics from Oberlin College and a Ph.D. degree in psychology from Carnegie Mellon University. He holds 50 patents and has published 90 papers and three books. He is presently a Consulting Professor in the Computer Science Dept. at Stanford University.