HCI2005: The Bigger Picture for HCI, from Multiple Monitors to a Lifetime in one Take

'H is Human Scale and Human-Centred approaches to design...C is Cultural and Contextual areas...and I is for Interface and Interaction issues, which many would see as the 'core business' of HCI...'

So began the HCI 2005 conference, this year at Napier University in the care of Tom McEwan. At various times, the chant of 'Give me an H... give me a C..., give me an I. What does that spell?' broke out in places where McEwan was to be found, but for the opening session he kept to the sophisticated version and explained how the sessions had been themed to reflect the areas he saw as now key to our research. 'Together this I, C and H can be taken to symbolise the adult identity of HCI,' he said.

And then he handed over to Mary Czerwinski of Microsoft Research to talk about "The bigger picture for HCI", picking up the overall theme of the Edinburgh conference.

She spent much of the talk bringing the audience up to date with Microsoft's work on big and multiple displays – a very literal 'bigger picture'. People using larger displays are always significantly faster and more satisfied, she said. But new tools are needed to manage information displayed in this way: the taskbar becomes useless as more applications sit open on the display - with too many small boxes showing one letter: 'M for Microsoft'. She ran through innovations such as Wincuts, Scalable Fabric (downloadable from the link below) and Vibelogger, an analysis tool that explores how people are switching tasks by logging events across multiple monitors.

But before embarking on this review, she addressed the bigger picture more generically. She looked at the roots of HCI in the 40s and 50s, when it pulled cognitive psychology into service to solve the problems of experts managing large systems. But, she said, the 80s and 90s, with the dominance of the PC, saw less complex systems and, although the metaphor of the human as information processor led theory, there was something of a stasis. Now, with the beginnings of ubiquitous computing, Czerwinski said, time has stopped standing still; systems are getting more complex again; there are multiple channels of communication, but very little theory or development in paradigmatic terms. Perhaps Activity Theory holds promise for the UbiCom domain, she said.

Looking at developments, she took privacy as an example of an area where HCI might be of use but said few researchers were going this way, despite the prospect of RFID tags under the skin. And she held up the pursuits of Gordon Bell as exemplifying future potential for all that is good and bad. (Bell has ostensibly turned his life into bits – "MyLifeBits is a lifetime store of everything" - though it might be fairer to say that he has captured all the external trappings he can muster together in a digital store.) This took her presentation on to the idea of 'passive capture', the collecting of a lifetime through a camera on, or in, the body that is always on. Who controls access to such records and what is the impact of being able to prove who is right in a dispute? Czerwinski shot through a wide range of ethical and social aspects to these developments, but, though confessing: 'I don't want an accurate record of the past sometimes', she asked more questions than offered theory with which to provide answers.

Associated Link: Microsoft Scalable Fabric (among other downloads)

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