At the Confluence of Software Engineering and Human-Computer Interaction: A Personal Account

Overview & Synopsis

In this article, I review how the fields of Human Computer Interaction (HCI) and Computer Science have come together over the last sixty years to create and support novel forms of interaction. We see how interaction models have progressively incorporated human skills and abilities, as well as the physical and social properties taken from the real world. I organize this evolution into three periods -pre-HCI, seminal HCI, ubiquitous HCI. Each of these periods is illustrated with key reference works that have influenced my own research as well as contributions of French researchers to the field.Eventually, programmers saw their task facilitated by "high level programming languages" such as FORTRAN, COBOL and Algol 60. Programming languages resulted from early attempts to abstract away from the low-level details of computing. In particular, conditional branching and loop statements incorporated Individual procedures are indicated with markers (name slashes of different colors) Toggle switches Registers lamps (one per bit)