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1.3 What is interaction design? 7

diversity of other practitioners becoming involved, including graphic designers,
artists, animators, photographers, film experts, and product designers. Below we
outline a brief history of interaction design.
In the early days, engineers designed hardware systems for engineers to use.
The computer interface was relatively straightforward, comprising various switch
panels and dials that controlled a set of internal registers. With the advent of moni-
tors (then referred to as visual display units or VDUs) and personal workstations in
the late '70s and early '80s, interface design came into being (Grudin, 1990). The
new concept of the user interface presented many challenges:
Terror. You have to confront the documentation. You have to learn a new language. Did
you ever use the word 'interface' before you started using the computer?
-Advertising executive Arthur Einstein (1990)
One of the biggest challenges at that time was to develop computers that could
be accessible and usable by other people, besides engineers, to support tasks in-
volving human cognition (e.g., doing sums, writing documents, managing accounts,
drawing plans). To make this possible, computer scientists and psychologists be-
came involved in designing user interfaces. Computer scientists and software engi-
neers developed high-level programming languages (e.g., BASIC, Prolog), system
architectures, software design methods, and command-based languages to help in
such tasks, while psychologists provided information about human capabilities
(e.g., memory, decision making).
The scope afforded by the interactive computing technology of that time (i.e.,
the combined use of visual displays and interactive keyboards) brought about
many new challenges. Research into and development of graphical user inter-
faces (GUI for short, pronounced "goo-ee") for office-based systems took off in
a big way. There was much research into the design of widgets (e.g., menus, win-
dows, palettes, icons) in terms of how best to structure and present them in a
GUI.
In the mid '80s, the next wave of computing technologies-including speech
recognition, multimedia, information visualization, and virtual reality-presented
even more opportunities for designing applications to support even more people.
Education and training were two areas that received much attention. Interactive
learning environments, educational software, and training simulators were some of
the main outcomes. To build these new kinds of interactive systems, however, re-
quired a different kind of expertise from that of psychologists and computer pro-
grammers. Educational technologists, developmental psychologists, and training
experts joined in the enterprise.
As further waves of technological development surfaced in the '90s-network-
ing, mobile computing, and infrared sensing-the creation of a diversity of applica-
tions for all people became a real possibility. All aspects of a person's life-at
home, on the move, at school, at leisure as well as at work, alone, with family or
friends-began to be seen as areas that could be enhanced and extended by design-
ing and integrating various arrangements of computer technologies. New ways of
learning, communicating, working, discovering, and living were envisioned.