When I was in school, history was presented as an immutable timeline, stretching from the dawn of writing to about World War II, after which it was too controversial for children. My forays into the early days of HCI have revealed less constancy; history changes as our perspective changes. We continually rewrite history.
A well-attended event at CHI 2008 was “Usability Evaluation Considered Harmful,” featuring a critique of CHI reviewing practices by Saul Greenberg and Bill Buxton. They argued that three HCI landmarks, featured in most HCI histories, omitted studies of use and therefore would have fared poorly at the hands of CHI reviewers. They wrote: “Usability evaluation, as practiced today, is appropriate for settings with well-known tasks and outcomes. Unfortunately, [it fails] to consider how novel engineering innovations and systems will evolve and be adopted by a culture over time.” Greenberg and Buxton stress that the CHI community needs to be far more liberal in considering what makes a valuable contribution. Agreed, but on careful examination each of these early contributions has more to say about HCI history and practice than is generally noted…
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It’s a good point, but I’m not sure that “everyone” has converged on this - while CHI has tried to include Design in the proceedings, strong papers continually get rejected because reviewers are stuck in a very old, very academic, and very pragmatic mindset of requiring not only evaluation but quantitative evidence of evaluation …
This is a nice advance on the discussion that was started by Saul and Bill’s paper. It’s clear from Grudin’s discussion here that Engelbart and Sutherland both benefited from feedback. There is no mistake that every cycle of technology is informed by feedback of what worked and what didn’t. The question is what is an acceptable amount of feedback, and whether the requiring a discussion of that feedback is a necessary condition for publication. I’m glad that everyone seems to have converged on the fact that sometimes technology is sufficiently interesting and advanced that we shouldn’t require evaluation as a pre-condition for publication.