Being Human: human-computer interaction in the year 2020

By: Michael Kenward / Tags: Multi-media, Human values

Computer technologies have suffused the world we live in. They have created change and continue to create change. This is manifest not only on our desktops and in our hands, but in virtually all aspects of our lives, in our communities and in the wider society.

What will our world be like in 2020? Digital technologies will continue to proliferate and enable ever more change in how we live. But will such developments improve quality of life, empower us and make us feel safer, happier and more connected? Or will living with so much technology make life more tiresome, frustrating, angst ridden and security driven?

In March 2007, Microsoft Research organised the ‘HCI 2020' meeting at the El Bulli Hacienda Hotel near Seville, Spain. The term Human–Computer Interaction refers to the understanding and design of different relationships between people and computers.

The event considered the key question: what will Human–Computer Interaction (HCI) be like in the year 2020? That question is important because HCI, significant as it was in the late 20th century, has a pivotal part to play in the 21st, when computers will become so pervasive that a crucial issue for society will be how humans interact with them.

The forum brought together some of the world's leading thinkers on this topic. The hope was that their discussions, debates and scholarly commentaries would help define how HCI can deliver this ‘human face' of computing. The event made it clear that we need a more extensive set of lenses, tools and methods that put human values centre stage. And we need to consider both positive and negative aspects.

On the one hand, people use technology to pursue healthier and more enjoyable lifestyles, expand their creative skills with digital tools, and instantly gain access to information never before available. On the other, governments become more reliant on computers to control society, criminals become more ‘digitally cunning', and people worry more about what information is stored about them.

An important aspect of this evolution in computing is how we interact with the many thousands of devices increasingly at our disposal. Just as the keyboard and mouse, and the computer screen ‘graphical user interface,' or GUI, made it possible to do much more than was possible with punched cards and tape, new forms of computing will demand new interaction mechanisms.

From GUIs to multi-touch screens, speech and gesture recognition, the ways we interact with computers are diversifying as never before. Twohanded and multi-fingered input is providing a more natural and flexible means of interaction beyond the single point of contact offered by either the mouse or stylus. The shift to multiple points of input also supports novel forms of interaction where people can share a single interface by gathering around it and interacting together.

If there was one thing that the participants in HCI 2020 had in common, it was a recognition that any new direction for HCI would need to place human values at its core. The great accomplishment of HCI has been, to date, that it allows us to look beyond what one might call the mechanics of the interface - such things as the design of the graphical user interface and of keyboards and of mice.

The success of HCI now allows researchers to focus on how computers can support human-to-human concerns, rather than simply humanmachine interaction. HCI has helped to produce a world in which interacting with computers is easier and richer. The real HCI issues now include what might be our aspirations, our desires for self-understanding and expression, and our willingness to use imagination to create a different future.

The report from HCI 2020 in Seville not only describes the ways in which computing has developed and the issues that we need to address in HCI, it also offers some proposals that can guide the future direction of work in this domain. The most important suggestion - that HCI needs to focus more clearly on human values - will require a more sensitive view about the role, function and consequences of design, just as it will force HCI to be more inventive.

Since its inception in the 1980s, HCI has been primarily concerned with designing more usable computer systems, be it the computer desktop, the VCR, the Web, or the mobile phone. It takes bad designs and shows how to improve them. And, it tries to apply its methods to design good systems from the start. But HCI needs to change what it does if it is to keep up with and influence the transformations in our midst.

By 2020, society's relationship with technology will be quite different from what it has meant to be ‘users' of computers. Computers will quite literally be everywhere, from inside our bodies to roaming Mars. They will also look and feel quite different from the PCs, laptops or handheld computers of the 1990s. There will be many opportunities to use them in diverse and novel ways not possible now, allowing us to express ourselves, be creative, and to nurture, protect, and care for one another in new ways.

But technological advances can equally support the darker side of what it means to be human. People may use them to find ever more sophisticated and subtle ways to control us, deceive us or to spy on our every movement and transaction. Even if computers are not used with nefarious intentions, we could equally find ourselves in a world where we are bombarded with information, told what to do by our cars, offices and homes, forced to grapple with ever more complex technologies in our home and working lives, and monitored, measured and recorded without our knowing.

The thinking that came out of HCI 2020 suggests that we need a quite different mindset for thinking about how to design for, control and interact with emerging ecosystems of technologies. To begin, HCI needs to understand and analyse the wider set of issues that are now at play, most notably human values, including the moral and ethical aspects of designing technologies for new domains.

In keeping with an event focused on research, HCI 2020 led to seven recommendations for bringing about a new way of undertaking HCI research and design and to make it more relevant to today's world. The goal is to find ways HCI can make a stronger impact on the relationship between people and technology at a personal, interpersonal and societal level.

The recommendations start at the fundamental level, calling for a rethink of the design methods used in HCI. These have already changed over the years. But as computer systems and the views of their users continue to change and diversify, we need to be aware of the implications of these changes for the methods and techniques HCI will use in future. For this to happen, we need to explore new ways of understanding users.

Another recommendation is that HCI researchers need to know how to converse with disciplines with very different traditions. HCI researchers will need to know what other disciplines are good at and what those skills and techniques offer.

Another challenge for HCI is in the training of the people who will go on to carry out research in this area. A further HCI 2020 recommendation is that the community should consider how it might scale-up its educational processes to develop a generation of researchers and practitioners that can comfortably engage with the broad set of disciplines involved.

In addition to increased support for training and the production of PhDs in this area, this will require HCI to revisit its curriculum so that researchers can not only use new software tools but can also communicate with people outside of the discipline. Throughout their work, part of the training will be to explore ways to alert the public at large to the complex and value-laden design possibilities they are dealing with.

It is all too easy to get excited by the future by thinking solely of the new capabilities and technologies and the advantages they will bring. However, there is also a need for some balance. HCI, in particular, needs to recognise the global nature of future development. While radical technologies will continue to emerge, an equally exciting research agenda has to do with the use of computer systems in all parts of the world.

One final recommendation emerged from the work of HCI 2020: that, by 2020, HCI will need to be able to design for and support differences in human value, irrespective of the economic means of those seeking those values. In this way, the future can be different and diverse because people want it to be.