Timeline: History of HCI, UCD and UX

Frederick Taylor applies photography, moving pictures, and statistical analysis to reduce task time on the assembly line. The origin of systematic study of human performance with a tool, half a century before the first computer.

Publication: The Principles of Scientific Management

Writing in De Stijl, Theo van Doesburg says the epoch is hostile to every subjective speculation and that 'in order to construct a new object we need a method, that is to say, an objective system'. Le Corbusier adds shortly after that rendering the traffic within a house exact and economical is the key effort of modern architectural science. Cross calls this scientific design: industrial design grounded in scientific knowledge but still mixing intuitive and non-intuitive methods. The wish to scientise design, forty years before the methods movement.

Publication: Towards a Collective Construction (De Stijl)

Paul Otlet organizes 15 million index cards and millions of images under the Universal Decimal Classification, with a formula for linking items to one another. A paper hypertext system, predating the Memex and never cited by those who invented Xerox Notecards fifty years later.

Publication: Traité de documentation

Early computing projects employ three kinds of people: managers, programmers, and operators. Each occupation later became the focus of a different discipline: Information Systems, Computer Science, and Human Factors. That division of labor still explains why the field never unified.

Murrell and others convene an interdisciplinary meeting of anatomists, physiologists, industrial medical officers, hygienists, design engineers, architects, and illuminating engineers, out of which the Ergonomics Research Society is formed. It predates the American Human Factors Society by eight years. That explains why the first HCI paper, in 1959, came from a British ergonomist rather than a computer scientist.

The Japanese Society for the Science of Design is founded in 1954. It predates any equivalent organization in Europe or the United States, and arrives eight years before the first design methods conference in London. Korea followed in 1978 and China later. The history of design as told in English usually starts at London and Berkeley.

John Arnold, a psychologist and engineer, is hired with a joint appointment in Mechanical Engineering and the Graduate School of Business to develop product design education. In 1959, with Robert McKim and Matthew Kahn, he establishes the Joint Program in Product Design across engineering, art, and architecture: a combination the university itself called 'unusual' and that fit no accredited curriculum.

That same year, Stanford's summer program in Creative Engineering brings together Abraham Maslow, Robert Hartman, and J.P. Guilford with McKim and Arnold. Out of it comes an explicitly humanistic design philosophy. Human values and needs are of prime importance to the designer, McKim writes, because design is, after all, a response to human needs.

Emery and Trist propose that systems involve complex interaction between people, machines, and work context. All three factors must be considered in design.

Publication: Socio-Technical Systems (en Management Science Models and Techniques)

Bruce Archer and John Chris Jones, both engineers who came to design, organize the first conference on design methods at Imperial College London. In 1970 Jones publishes Design Methods: Seeds of Human Futures with an explicit aim: to take design out of the black box of inspiration and turn it into an articulated methodology. Seven years later Jones himself leaves the movement, declaring the methods had become too rigid. That is the end of what Rittel had called first-generation design methods.

Publication: Design Methods: Seeds of Human Futures (Jones, 1970)

Amdahl, Blaauw, and Brooks define the IBM System/360's architecture as 'the conceptual structure and functional behavior', distinguishing it from physical implementation. It is the first time the term is abstracted away from hardware to name an organization of data flows and controls. Twelve years would pass before anyone applied it to information for people.

Publication: Architecture of the IBM System/360 (IBM Journal of Research and Development)

A sociology graduate student, Nelson founds Project Xanadu in 1960 and in 1965 publishes 'A file structure for the complex, the changing and the indeterminate'. He never considered the Web an adequate realization of his vision, though weblogs, wikis, and collaborative tagging delivered much of it.

Publication: A File Structure for the Complex, the Changing and the Indeterminate

The DRS is founded in London in April 1966, with Archer among its original members. Together with Berkeley's Design Methods Group it publishes the DMG-DRS Journal until 1979, when the DRS launches Design Studies under Nigel Cross's editorship. Its conferences asked what constitutes design knowledge, and whether design is a science or something else that uses scientific methods. CHI would ask the same questions a decade later, from the other side. In 1982 Design Issues is founded at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and its first issue appears in 1984. Its aim was declaredly opposite: not to seek the foundations of a science of design, but to provoke and raise controversial issues.

Publication: Design Studies

Building on the conceptual framework he published in 1962, Engelbart presents a 90-minute live demo in San Francisco with mouse, windows, word processing, and integrated video. His NLS system required training: DARPA installed it, found it too hard to use, and withdrew support. The question he left open — optimize for skilled use or for initial use — is still with us.

Publication: Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework

In June the DMG holds its first annual international conference, on the theory and application of design, planning, and engineering methodology. Its program declares a twofold purpose: to provide a format for peer evaluation and to encourage dialogue between researchers and practitioners. The gap between research and practice was already the problem, and would remain so.

Out of the Compton Lectures Simon gave at MIT in 1968 comes The Sciences of the Artificial. From it comes his most-quoted definition: to design is to transform existing situations into preferred ones. The book became seminal for design research. Its technical-rational stance contrasts with the humanistic and creative strand growing alongside it, and how much can be attributed to it is now disputed. There Simon also defines 'the science of design' as a teachable body of doctrine about the design process. Cross insists on separating three things the popular account collapses. Scientific design is industrial design grounded in scientific knowledge. Design science is designing as a scientific activity in itself. The science of design is studying design through systematic methods. Simon belongs to the third, not the second.

Publication: The Sciences of the Artificial

Founded the same year as HUSAT and with an equally broad charter, PARC is anchored in a vision of discretionary use and in cognitive psychology. In 1973 the Alto arrives: too expensive to sell, but enough to show that a graphical interface could be accessible to untrained people. Its founding charter spoke of developing 'the architecture of information', a phrase Xerox adopted as its corporate mission and that stayed in the field's vocabulary.

The socio-technical approach to system design responds to user difficulty and resistance. It proposes educating representative workers about technical possibilities and involving them in design, partly to increase acceptance of the resulting system. The managerial ancestor of participatory design.

Publication: Systems Design for People

The first widely read HCI book opens with a line that defines the transition: 'the terminal or console operator, instead of being a peripheral consideration, will become the tail that wags the whole dog'. The industry, he writes, will be forced to care about the usage of people rather than the computer's intestines.

Publication: Design of Man-Computer Dialogues

Richard Saul Wurman, an architect by training, chairs the American Institute of Architects national conference on the theme 'The Architecture of Information'; the year before he had published with Joel Katz the article that names it. His definition: the individual who organizes the patterns inherent in data, making the complex clear. In 1988 he takes the idea public with Information Anxiety. Years later he admitted he had no plan to found a discipline, that he was only 'finding patterns for himself'.

Publication: Beyond Graphics: The Architecture of Information (AIA Journal, con Joel Katz, 1975)

ACM creates SIGOA and the first office automation conference is held. The field identifies topics that would become central — hypertext, computer-mediated communication, collaboration support — but the word 'automation' excited researchers and alarmed office workers. In 1986 SIGOA became SIGOIS, and by 1995 the field had disappeared, absorbed by others.

Publication: ACM Transactions on Office Information Systems

The founding book of cognitive HCI introduces GOMS and the keystroke-level model: the time a task takes is determined by the time to do the keystrokes. It was explicitly positioned to counter the stimulus-response bias of Human Factors, and it models expert, repetitive use — not novice or discretionary use.

Publication: The Psychology of Human-Computer Interaction

From the Design, Theory, and Methods Group formed at MIT in 1982, Schön describes how professionals actually think while working. They do not apply theory: they hold a reflective conversation with the situation in front of them. It became a foundational text for those who study design work phenomenologically.

Publication: The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action

The Macintosh's success abruptly makes a decade of research on command naming and interaction languages irrelevant. Many cognitive psychologists had bet on a comprehensive theoretical foundation for HCI; the graphical interface left it without a subject. Rigorous experimentation gives way to quicker, less precise assessment methods.

The first Computer-Supported Cooperative Work conference brings together researchers from Information Systems, office automation, CHI, distributed AI, and anthropology. It was the most serious effort to join the fields. Most IS researchers left by 1990 and the bridge was left half-built, though CSCW remains a strong area.

Publication: Computer-Supported Cooperative Work: A Book of Readings

Rooted in the Danish trade union movement, cooperative design seeks to empower the people who will use the system, not merely increase their acceptance. The 1985 Aarhus conference and its proceedings make it influential. It is a critique of Information Systems approaches, yet it resonates with the CHI community. Both share the goal of empowering hands-on users.

Publication: Computers and Democracy: A Scandinavian Challenge

TAM explains adoption through perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use. It is the most cited HCI work in Information Systems, and its success signals that mandated use was giving way to workers who could refuse to play. CHI had addressed usability a decade earlier, but measuring actual usability rather than perception.

Publication: Perceived Usefulness, Perceived Ease of Use, and User Acceptance of Information Technology (MIS Quarterly)

Bill Moggridge and David Kelley, who had been teaching Advanced Product Design at Stanford for over a decade, found IDEO with Mike Nuttall. By the mid-1990s their brainstorming culture and their role as knowledge brokers between industries become an object of study for business scholars. Their own employees published a process — understand, observe, visualize, evaluate, refine — and its techniques: storytelling, scenarios, metaphors, observations, interviews, and role-playing.

Between 1994 and 1999, NSF, DARPA, NASA, and Library of Congress initiatives invest close to $200 million in digital library research. Digital technology was already a prerequisite for librarianship. By 2000, ten schools had 'Information' as the sole discipline in their name.

A designer's book for designers: a collection of visual solutions to the problem of communicating rising amounts of information. It appears one year before the book that would define the field, and with a different idea of what the work is.

Publication: Information Architects (Graphis)

The Inmates Are Running the Asylum popularizes Personas: concrete archetypes that make tangible, for those who code, who is being designed for.

Publication: The Inmates Are Running the Asylum (Sams Publishing)

Don't Make Me Think reduces usability to actionable principles and takes it out of the lab and into product teams.

Publication: Don't Make Me Think! (New Riders Press)

The Elements of User Experience organizes design into five planes, from strategy to surface, giving UX a vocabulary shared with business and development.

Publication: The Elements of User Experience (New Riders Press)

Emotional Design incorporates the visceral, behavioral, and reflective dimensions: beautiful things work better because they change the emotional state of the person using them.

Publication: Emotional Design (Basic Books)

With collaborative tagging, mobile devices, and people producing information as well as consuming it, the discipline stops being a synonym for building websites. Morville reframes it as ambient findability, and a pervasive information architecture emerges. It designs information spaces that cut across channels, in conversation with ubiquitous computing and service design.

Publication: Ambient Findability (O'Reilly)

The standard defines the human-centred design process for interactive systems and replaces 'user' with 'human'. It comes from the ergonomics branch of the field, the one that never stopped believing standards contribute to efficiency. CHI kept alive the opposite view: that standards inhibit innovation.

Publication: ISO 9241-210:2010