"Today a widely distributed diverse community of working professionals is inventing a reality where the use of computing resources will have a profound impact on the quality of everyday life. And so we are practicing in a field where the gradient of change is staggering, the boundaries fuzzy, and the component parts only loosely aggregated. interactions was conceived as a forum for envisioning the transformation of this new field of practice, and as a place where this pioneering community can expose the knowledge and experience that will delineate the boundary conditions as they are discovered."

John Rheinfrank, Bill Hefley. Reflections, in interactions. January 1994, Volume 1, Number 1: p88.

interactions was started in January, 1994, by John Rheinfrank, Bill Hefley, Brad Myers, and Shelley Evenson. John and Bill were the first to fill the role of Editor-in-Chief, and much of their initial editorial seems as if it could have been written today:

"Why interactions? We seem to have moved well beyond the idea that making a 'computer' useful is simply to design a good interface between 'man and machine.' Our ideas have evolved to a point where the richness of human experience comes to the foreground and computing sits in the background in the service of these experiences. In the workplace we realize that 'work design' must coevolve with the design of the tools we use. In the schools we recognize that the most powerful learning experiences involve the collaborative construction of knowledge rather than forced transfer. And in the arena of entertainment and play and enormous amount of creative energy has been directed toward 'interactive media.'

Such 'interactions' have played a role in the conceptualizing and development of this magazine."

John and Bill handled the role of Editor-in-Chief for the first two years. John filled the role alone throughout 1996.

For the next two years, the role of the Editor-in-Chief didn't exist, as different people held responsibility for different sections of the publication. During this period of time, the Features Editor was Marc Rettig.

Steven Pemberton resurrected the role of Editor-in-Chief a bit into 1998 and, incredibly, remained in the role through the end of 2004. In his introduction of himself to interactions readers, Steven wrote:

"I see interactions as an essential part of the Human-Computer Interaction field, as the point of contact between research and practice: interactions is to HCI what Communications of the ACM is to computing as a whole. HCI is an exceptionally broad school, which means that we have a lot to talk about, but a lot to cover as well; interactions is here to report on what the people at the forefront of the field, both researchers and practitioners, throughout the world, are doing, in a language that is easy to understand, and presented attractively and intelligently."

During his tenure, Steven introduced the first interactions website.

Jonathan Arnowitz and Elizabeth Dykstra-Erickson filled the role of Editors-in-Chief from 2005 through 2007. In their final issue, Jonathan and Elizabeth wrote:

"We have found over the past three years that articles in interactions are frequently cited in academic courses or used to make a point in a practitioner setting."

Richard Anderson and Jon Kolko began their work as Editors-in-Chief in May 2007, though their first issue was not to appear until January+Feburary 2008, when this website was also born.