Post-cognitivist HCI: A Brief Conventional History of HCI and Its Paradigm Waves (Part 6)

A Brief Conventional History of HCI

Out of military and wartime needs, the fields of engineering psychology, ergonomics and human factors emerged as early as the Second World War. They were meant to reduce the errors in the design of aircraft cockpit controls that were causing loss of life, or to increase the efficiency of human operators in operating heavy machinery in factories and the first computers. Later, professional institutions were founded, the Ergonomics Research Society in Great Britain in 1949, and in 1957 the American Human Factors Society followed^1,2.

Ivan Sutherland, who built on the military research of the SAGE system, presented the interactive graphics program Sketchpad in his doctoral dissertation. Douglas Engelbart then developed the NLS system, with a computer mouse and windows, at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI), and in the laboratories of the American company Xerox PARC the first graphical user interface was created, whose commercial success was secured by Apple. In the 1980s the new field of Human-Computer Interaction became a discipline of its own, one that drew on the earlier research in human factors but added findings from cognitive science.

At the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI) in 1983, the researcher Don Norman presented a paper still influenced by the focus on ergonomics and human factors. He wrote that increasing user satisfaction requires the optimisation of speed of use, ease of learning, the level of required knowledge and the avoidance of errors³. In 1986, however, Norman edited, with his colleague Draper, the academically oriented book User centered system design: new perspectives on human-computer interaction⁴, which announced that a focus on the human user and their needs is an important part of the development and design of technologies.

In 1988 Don Norman published the seminal book The Psychology of Everyday Things, later renamed The Design of Everyday Things, in which, for the first time and for a wider audience, he popularises HCI’s turn away from purely utilitarian and technical problems towards a focus on the user and towards the theorising of HCI. In the book he introduced to the HCI audience, for the first time, the concepts of mental models and mapping, taken over from cognitive science. Norman stresses in the book that the “mental model” of how a technology works is formed not only by the designer’s intentions, but that the user, too, creates their own model on the basis of experience, practice, instructions and, above all, by interpreting, in interaction, the perceptible and visible structures of the technology, through which they create its system image. If this image is clear, it contributes to the ease of use of the given device or system⁵.

We can find a similar relativisation of the relation between user, designer and technology in Norman’s adoption and redefinition of the concept of affordance, taken over from his mentor, the eminent psychologist J. J. Gibson. In the original 1988 edition we do not learn much about affordances, but in the revised edition of 2013 Norman explains that affordances, as perceptible properties of objects that enable the user to take some action, are not fixed, a priori properties of these objects, but rather a relationship between a physical object and an interacting agent, for example a human being, but also another machine, between the properties of an object and the capabilities of the agent to interpret how the object could be used⁶. The relational aspect of interaction that Norman champions means that the user’s ability to interpret the properties of objects depends to a large extent not only on their cognitive abilities, but also on their knowledge of cultural and social codes.

In the user’s interpretation of the functions of objects, emotions and the subjective significance of these functions, which shape users’ experiences of using technology, also play a role. Norman discusses the role of emotions in another of his books, Emotional design, and one of the current approaches in the field of HCI, referred to as User Experience design, is also concerned with it. Although affordance as a relation between human, environment and object, and the focus on human needs, unmistakably seem, in Norman’s work, to herald the importance of the sociocultural context, Bødker⁷ notes that emotions in his work are an add-on to cognition and are still anchored in the cognitivist paradigm of the information-processing model of cognition.

For Bødker and Boehner et al.⁸ and others, emotions, experiences and the attribution of meaning to things are important aspects that shape the nature of interaction with technologies, but they reject the cognitivist thesis that it is possible to understand and study their causes by looking into the heads of individuals. The opposition to cognitivism, and not only in HCI, claims that our psychological states are the result of a complex interconnection of the human being, culture, society and also the place and time in which the individual finds themselves. Emotions, experiences, meaning-making and interaction can be understood as a dynamic, culturally mediated, and socially constructed and experienced process⁹.

This postulate confronts the cognitivist dogma of the computational model of human cognition that persists in the fields of cognitive science, artificial intelligence, the philosophy of mind and other related fields. Over the last three decades its shortcomings have been pointed out by several approaches, which form a diverse yet in many respects unified alternative. They represent a new paradigm, in the formal sense defined by the philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn, which, however, does not necessarily invalidate the preceding approaches, for they can exist side by side. Yet a new paradigm almost always reformulates the questions that are worth investigating, and changes the methods used to answer them as well. At the same time, we can understand it as the outcome of a longer-term pressure on the dominant paradigm, which is less and less able to explain the problems of the field and the continual changes to which it responds. The literature speaks of several paradigms that the field of HCI has gone through so far.

Paradigm Waves in HCI

Paradigms in HCI are described in the literature as chronologically successive “waves” of ideas and theories. There are, however, different analyses of which approaches belong to which wave, and some academics merge two waves into one.

Thus, for example, Harrison and his colleagues¹⁰ identify three main waves in HCI: by the first wave they mean the period when HCI as a field did not yet exist and the relation between human and technology was studied and designed on the engineering basis of the previously mentioned fields of ergonomics and human factors. According to Harrison, this wave was a-theoretic and above all pragmatically oriented towards generating functional solutions without deeper theoretical reflection. They identify the second wave as the turn to cognitive science, which brought the influence of cognitivism into HCI. The third wave they find at the intersection of fields that criticise the theoretical foundations of cognitivism and its inadequate means for grasping the meaning of interaction as a situated and socially co-constructed phenomenon.

The third wave of HCI also responds to the concept of ubiquitous computing and the Internet of Things: with the spread of technology we more often encounter in our lives cases in which technology works in the background and does not require the user to consciously perform any tasks, whereby task analysis, popular in the second wave, becomes less useful, even irrelevant. Harrison places in the third wave the efforts of Scandinavian participatory design to democratise design in the workplace by involving workers in the design process, ethnomethodology, User Experience design, or embodied interaction and the concept of “embodiment”, which draw on the philosophical current of phenomenology.

If we look at other texts describing the waves in HCI, the theorist Susanne Bødker, in her influential article When Second Wave HCI meets Third Wave Challenges, puts forward a different chronology of the historical development. Into the first wave she places together the period of ergonomics and human factors as well as that of cognitive science in HCI, thereby merging the first two waves described by Harrison. Into the second wave Bødker places approaches crucial to the topic of this thesis, such as situated action, distributed cognition and activity theory, which she regards as “important sources of theoretical reflection, and concepts like context came into focus of analysis and design of human-computer interaction”¹¹.

On the basis of the following analysis of the history of the influence of the cognitive sciences and of cognitivism in HCI, I cannot agree with this division of Bødker’s, for it gathers into one wave theories, methods and approaches that are too diverse. Thus, for example, the a-theoretically oriented ergonomics and human factors stand in explicit opposition to the heavily theoretically oriented period in which HCI took over the findings of the cognitive sciences and the research stance of cognitivism. And, as I will analyse further on in the thesis, cognitivism, on the contrary, is at odds with the aforementioned approaches of situated cognition and, in part, also of distributed cognition, which go beyond the limitations of cognitivism as well as the body–mind or subject–object dichotomies. To place all these approaches in one wave merely because no very long period of time separates them chronologically is, in my view, not a compelling argument for such a categorisation, which needlessly obscures such fundamental and pivotal moments of the whole field of HCI.

According to Bødker, the main reason for the adoption of the approaches of situated cognition and distributed cognition lay primarily in the focus on the context of corporate and work environments, in which collaboration in groups was studied. But that was certainly not the main reason¹². Into her third wave she then places, with reference to the article Emotion and design by Don Norman, in general those approaches that focus on the aesthetic, experiential and emotional aspects of the design of technological artefacts in work, public, domestic and, more generally, cultural contexts. The third wave of HCI thus corresponds to the goals of theorists and practising designers who gather under the banner of several approaches, namely Human-centered design (HCD), interaction design and User Experience design, which have either become independent as new fields or, in the case of HCD, have become, loosely speaking, the “philosophical” branch of the field of HCI.

Although I agree with the finer division into the second and third waves, in which the emphasis on emotions and experiences represents the real contribution, as well as the mixed success, of the User Experience design approach, we do not find in Bødker a clear definition of what new methods the third wave brings, and in many respects, in researching the topics of the third wave, she mentions the use of activity theory, which is not analysed in this thesis. After all, she herself writes that the approaches of the second wave need not be replaced; instead, it would be better to reorient them towards the context of non-work environments as well.

How can we unify the categorisation of the HCI waves mentioned above? In my view, by looking at them through the lens of how they come to terms with cognitivism and with the contextual aspects of interaction. That is why, following Kaptelinin and Nardi¹³, in this thesis I adopt the division of the HCI waves into cognitivist and post-cognitivist theories of HCI, among which belong phenomenology, extended and distributed cognition, or actor-network theory. Before I turn to the post-cognitivist theories of HCI, it is necessary to mention what they define themselves against. I will therefore present the main theses as well as the problems of cognitivism and outline current views of cognition, including their relevance to the field of HCI.

Notes

13 notes

1. 1↑

   TURNER, Phil., 2016. HCI redux: the promise of post-cognitive interaction. ISBN 9783319422336, p. 3.

2. 2↑

   GRUDIN, Jonathan, 2012. A Moving Target: The Evolution of Human–Computer Interaction. A. JACKO, Julie. Human-Computer Interaction Handbook: Fundamentals, Evolving Technologies, and Emerging Applications. 3rd ed. Boca Raton: CRC Press, pp. 29-64. ISBN 9781439829448.

3. 3↑

   GRUDIN, Jonathan, 2012. A Moving Target: The Evolution of Human–Computer Interaction. A. JACKO, Julie. Human-Computer Interaction Handbook: Fundamentals, Evolving Technologies, and Emerging Applications. 3rd ed. Boca Raton: CRC Press, pp. 29-64. ISBN 9781439829448.

4. 4↑

   NORMAN, Donald A. and Stephen W. DRAPER, ed., 1986. User centered system design: new perspectives on human-computer interaction. Hillsdale, N.J.: L. Erlbaum Associates. ISBN 0898597811.

5. 5↑

   NORMAN, Donald A., 1988. The design of everyday things. New York: Doubleday. ISBN 0385267746, p. 17.

6. 6↑

   NORMAN, Donald A., 2013. The design of everyday things. Revised and expanded edition. New York, New York: Basic Books. ISBN 978-0-465-00394-5, p. 11.

7. 7↑

   BØDKER, Susanne, 2006. When second wave HCI meets third wave challenges. In: Proceedings of the 4th Nordic conference on Human-computer interaction changing roles - NordiCHI '06 [online]. New York, New York, USA: ACM Press, 2006, pp. 1-8 [cited 2018-02-02]. DOI: 10.1145/1182475.1182476. ISBN 1595933255. Available at: http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=1182475.1182476

8. 8↑

   BOEHNER, Kirsten, Rogério DEPAULA, Paul DOURISH and Phoebe SENGERS, 2005. Affect. In: Proceedings of the 4th decennial conference on Critical computing between sense and sensibility - CC '05 [online]. New York, New York, USA: ACM Press, 2005, p. 59- [cited 2018-02-02]. DOI: 10.1145/1094562.1094570. ISBN 1595932038. Available at: http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=1094562.1094570

9. 9↑

   BOEHNER, Kirsten, Rogério DEPAULA, Paul DOURISH and Phoebe SENGERS, 2005. Affect. In: Proceedings of the 4th decennial conference on Critical computing between sense and sensibility - CC '05 [online]. New York, New York, USA: ACM Press, 2005, p. 59- [cited 2018-02-02]. DOI: 10.1145/1094562.1094570. ISBN 1595932038. Available at: http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=1094562.1094570

10. 10↑

    HARRISON, Steve R., Deborah Gail TATAR and Phoebe SENGERS, 2007. The three paradigms of HCI [online]. Conference: Conference: Alt. Chi. Session at the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems San Jose, California, USA [cited 2018-02-02]. Available at: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/215835951_The_three_paradigms_of_HCI

11. 11↑

    BØDKER, Susanne, 2006. When second wave HCI meets third wave challenges. In: Proceedings of the 4th Nordic conference on Human-computer interaction changing roles - NordiCHI '06 [online]. New York, New York, USA: ACM Press, 2006, pp. 1-8 [cited 2018-02-02]. DOI: 10.1145/1182475.1182476. ISBN 1595933255. Available at: http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=1182475.1182476

12. 12↑

    In the sections Cognitivism in HCI and The Critique of Cognitivism I show that it was not because the preceding approaches had failed to focus sufficiently on the work context that post-cognitivist approaches gained ground in HCI. The dominance of cognitivism in HCI was crumbling because it was becoming apparent across disciplines that the model of human thinking as a digital processor processing information was untenable.

13. 13↑

    KAPTELININ, Victor and Bonnie A. NARDI, 2006. Acting with technology: activity theory and interaction design. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Acting with technology. ISBN 9780262513319, pp. 195–196.

Literature

9 sources

• BØDKER, Susanne, 2006. When second wave HCI meets third wave challenges. In: Proceedings of the 4th Nordic conference on Human-computer interaction changing roles - NordiCHI '06 [online]. New York, New York, USA: ACM Press, 2006, pp. 1-8 [cited 2018-02-02]. DOI: 10.1145/1182475.1182476. ISBN 1595933255. Available at: http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=1182475.1182476
• BOEHNER, Kirsten, Rogério DEPAULA, Paul DOURISH and Phoebe SENGERS, 2005. Affect. In: Proceedings of the 4th decennial conference on Critical computing between sense and sensibility - CC '05 [online]. New York, New York, USA: ACM Press, 2005, p. 59- [cited 2018-02-02]. DOI: 10.1145/1094562.1094570. ISBN 1595932038. Available at: http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=1094562.1094570
• GRUDIN, Jonathan, 2012. A Moving Target: The Evolution of Human–Computer Interaction. A. JACKO, Julie. Human-Computer Interaction Handbook: Fundamentals, Evolving Technologies, and Emerging Applications. 3rd ed. Boca Raton: CRC Press, pp. 29-64. ISBN 9781439829448.
• HARRISON, Steve R., Deborah Gail TATAR and Phoebe SENGERS, 2007. The three paradigms of HCI [online]. Conference: Conference: Alt. Chi. Session at the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems San Jose, California, USA [cited 2018-02-02]. Available at: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/215835951_The_three_paradigms_of_HCI
• KAPTELININ, Victor and Bonnie A. NARDI, 2006. Acting with technology: activity theory and interaction design. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Acting with technology. ISBN 9780262513319.
• NORMAN, Donald A. and Stephen W. DRAPER, ed., 1986. User centered system design: new perspectives on human-computer interaction. Hillsdale, N.J.: L. Erlbaum Associates. ISBN 0898597811.
• NORMAN, Donald A., 1988. The design of everyday things. New York: Doubleday. ISBN 0385267746.
• NORMAN, Donald A., 2013. The design of everyday things. Revised and expanded edition. New York, New York: Basic Books. ISBN 978-0-465-00394-5.
• TURNER, Phil., 2016. HCI redux: the promise of post-cognitive interaction. ISBN 9783319422336.