Feature: Alan Newell assesses HCI and the Health of the Discipline

Alan Newell claims a sideways perspective on HCI, having used strategic components in his work of developing applications to help people with disabilities for decades. His department at Dundee numbers 37 researchers, ranging from specialists in linguistics, social work and psychology to computer programmers, speech and language therapists, a teacher, a nurse and a philosopher. He might also claim a longitudinal view: he has been involved in the business since 1968. And he's still in it, remaining passionate, restless and full of opinion.

With a difficult year behind the technology industry, Alan looks back to where work on humans, computers and interaction has come from, and forward, to winning the fight for usable design.

'HCI's gone through a number of metamorphoses, it's been called a whole host of things' says Alan thoughtfully, listing man-machine interfaces, ergonomics, human factors, and cybernetics before arriving at usability. He won't give a definition of usability: 'Practitioners don't even seem to be able to,' he says, leading him to his main concern about this latest trend: 'I worry about usability, because there is a tendency I've heard, to talk about usability as evaluating something and it seems to me that by the time you are thinking of evaluating something, it is far too late. Usability is a nice way of moving into the [HCI] field, but not if you are moving into it in an audit way, that's just a narrow part of it.'

However, as a term he regards it as preferable to interface design, another previous iteration: 'An interface is zero width. What we ought to be interested in and what, perhaps, usability is interested in is the interaction between the human being and the application,' he says, summing up his life-long vocation.

As well as changes in the discipline, Alan recognises academia, in general, moving to fall in with the current emphasis on short-term and commercial benefits.

'It's important that you still have both academia and business, otherwise the situation becomes governed wholly by what is seen to make money: you have to be very careful how you accept received truths, you have to be careful how you talk about your curiosity.' He gives the example of Gerald Ratner, who once announced his jewellery was crap and lost an empire. 'How he talked about his product: if that had been academia, he would have been alright. It could have been a valuable thing to say, but you can't do that when you are in a company.'

But less and less does academia have the freedom to do that. There is more focus on the potential to exploit commercially what people are doing. 'If that is one of the constraints on the funding, then the more radical areas won't get funded. Nothing I’ve ever done was thought of as a good idea when I started it.' He cites a number of examples where, when he began work on the project, the commercial area thought it was a waste of time, examples that have gone on to become solutions to thorny problems. The professor was awarded the Lloyd of Kilgerran Prize (The Foundation for Science and Technology) for his work in 1995, not to mention the National Training Award (for assisting children with spelling and writing difficulties), The Guardian Innovation Challenge Trophy for Social Welfare, the British Computer Society Award for Social Benefit and an MBE over the years.

'I'm not saying that everyone should pursue random mad ideas, but one or two should and I think it is getting harder to do what you want to do because the only way you can do research is to get funding for it. In the 70s, there was enough money floating around the system that you could try out some ideas and get them to the stage where is was possible to get funding.'

It's not even that academics and commercial people are being driven closer together. No, academics are being driven closer to commercial people. And he sees them having a fundamentally different motivation. But, while business people are encouraged to 'interfere' in how universities are run, the same people 'would not dream of inviting an academic to contribute to how a business is run.' The professor is indignant.

However, despite the constraints on doing blue-sky work at the moment, Alan remains positive about what will be achieved in a more general way. 'I am very optimistic: I think that in five years' time, people will stop buying unusable products. People say I'm stupid but I remember a time when, 20 years ago, Volvo nearly went bankrupt trying to sell safe cars. They were the only cars that were safe. They were built like tanks and people didn't want to buy them. But now you try and sell a car... look at the Mondeo advert.'

He compares the development of usability with the new awareness of environmental issues and how that has crept up. 'People will go into a shop and say "I want a video recorder I can use." Companies that don't produce usable products will just go out of business.'

But, looking at the people involved in researching the field, he sees new challenges. 'In HCI, they have the same problem as everyone in changing situations; they have to decide what are the most appropriate weapons and when to use them.

'I have been developing applications for people with disabilities for many years and till recently you had to proselytise. Now, with legislation, it is going to be much easier, so people like me are going to have to change their weapons. We will have to offer people pragmatic solutions, rather than shout and scream at them that they have got to do it because of all these poor disabled people.

'Equally, in HCI, when you are in a battle, you don't recognise when you have won the war. The HCI people who will win are the ones who realise that people are beginning to listen, that they have to change the message.'

He sees practitioners ahead in this respect and some pockets in academia who have caught up. 'You have people who are content where they are and other people, like me, who like to have a radical position: you can't have a radical position if you've won.' He emits a sudden burst of laughter. 'So you either change your field or you change your position.'

The professor has positioned himself within his team so that he can circulate as the need arises for other reasons too. As he talks a little about the work he does, he touches on the subject of interdisciplinarity: 'I believe to carry out proper multi-disciplinary work, you have got to have somebody who is prepared to know less about their own subject so they can know a bit about others. I don't actually know as much about computer science as I could if I focussed on it. Our team works very well together because there are a number of people like that.

'Because the major problem about disciplines is understanding what the other people's constraints and motivations are. Psychology is completely different from computer science, because a psychologist wants to understand the world and a computer scientist wants to change it.

'Me? I'm a changer, I'm an engineer.'

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