HCI Remixed: Essays on Works That Have Influenced the HCI Community (Mit Press)

HCI Remixed: Essays on Works That Have Influenced the HCI Community (Mit Press) by Erickson, Thomas. hardcover edition. ISBN: 9780262050883.

Personal and reflective essays that describe how particular works--whether papers, books, or demos, from classics to forgotten gems--have influenced each writers approach to HCI. Over almost three decades, the field of human-computer interaction (HCI) has produced a rich and varied literature. Although the focus of attention today is naturally on new work, older contributions that played a role in shaping the trajectory and character of the field have much to tell us. The contributors to HCI Remixed were asked to reflect on a single work at least ten years old that influenced their approach to HCI. The result is this collection of fifty-one short, engaging, and idiosyncratic essays, reflections on a range of works in a variety of forms that chart the emergence of a new field. An article, a demo, a book: any of these can solve a problem, demonstrate the usefulness of a new method, or prompt a shift in perspective. HCI Remixed offers us glimpses of how this comes about. The contributors consider such HCI classics as Sutherlands Sketchpad, Englebarts demo of NLS, and Fitts on Fitts Law--and such forgotten gems as Pulfers NRC Music Machine, and Galloway and Rabinowitzs Hole in Space. Others reflect on works somewhere in between classic and forgotten--Kidds "The Marks Are on the Knowledge Worker," King Beachs "Becoming a Bartender," and others. Some contributors turn to works in neighboring disciplines--Henry Dreyfusss book on industrial design, for example--and some range farther afield, to Lovelocks Gaia hypothesis and Jane Jacobss The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Taken together, the essays offer an accessible, lively, and engaging introduction to HCI research that reflects the diversity of the fields beginnings.