Reading List for Forum

A number of books have appeared in the last few years which have opened up the field; exploring new theories, ideas and directions, and provoking us to consider how we design for a diversity of human experiences and values beyond the cognitive and the social. A few seminal ones that come to mind are:

• Both Don Norman's "Emotional Design" (2004) and John McCarthy and Peter Wright's "Technology as Experience" (2004) explore how good design is about more than efficiency and usability. It is also about fun, delight and pleasure in technological objects. Both books promote the emotional and aesthetic experience of living with technology.

• BJ Fogg's "Persuasive Technology" (2003) and Ben Shneiderman's "Leonardo's Laptop" (2002) look at the issue of how computer technologies can create longer term change in people's behaviour and make more far-reaching changes in society at large. These books explore how technologies become embedded in everyday life, and discuss the possibilities for future trends and technologies.

• Malcolm McCullough's "Digital Ground" (2004) and Adam Greenfield's "Everyware" (2006) consider the place of technology in another sense-these books ask what it means for computers to be truly ubiquitous and pervasive, embedded in the objects around us and in the environments we inhabit. McCullough examines this from the point of view of an architect, and Greenfield from the point of view of interaction design.

• For an economic argument on the impact of new technologies on society, see Chris Anderson's "The Long Tail" (2006) which describes how the internet is turning old-fashioned supply and demand economics into one where unlimited supply and choice is creating a new economy of niche markets.

• Andy Clark is a philosopher and cognitive scientist at Edinburgh University who writes about the relationship between humans and machines. As technologies and gizmos proliferate, he argues that, rather than view them as increasingly overloading, overburdening and frustrating humans, we embrace them, seeing them quite literally as an extension of our bodies and minds. The title of his last book "Natural Born Cyborgs" explored this theme and is recommended reading. Andy has also provided us with his latest paper that extends these ideas further, arguing for profound embodiment and human augmentation, covering robot arms, sensory enhancement and bodily extension. Andy has a knack of describing the interface between humans and machines in captivating ways that go far beyond the prosaic discourse of HCI , e.g., "Sensing and moving are the spots where the rubber of embodied agency meets the road of the wider world, the world outside the agent's physical boundaries."
  

Papers you might want to read include:

• Jonathan Grudin's "Living without parental controls: The future of HCI": a piece to appear in Interactions in March. Also, see Jonathan's trip report on NordiCHI 2006 contains some interesting observations on how the field might be changing to more domain-centered work in future.
• Yvonne Roger's recent paper at Ubicomp 2006 entitled "Moving on from Weiser's vision of calm computing: Engaging UbiComp experiences."
• Genevieve Bell and Paul Dourish's recent article in Personal and Ubiquitous Computing "Yesterday's tomorrows: Notes on ubiquitous computing's dominant vision."
• A recent paper in Personal and Ubiquitous Computing from Microsoft on home technologies which is in part a reaction against the "smart home" agenda: "Homes that make us smart".
• Pheobe Sengers' and Bill Gaver's DIS 2006 paper "Staying open to interpretation: Engaging multiple meanings in design and evaluation"; which explores the role of ambiguity in design.
• Egon Bittner's "Technique and the Conduct of Life" (Social Problems, Vol 30, No.3, Feb 1983). Though somewhat old, Bittner eloquently comments on what technology might mean for how we exist as humans, or, as he puts, it, for the conduct of our lives. Here he is thinking of how we evaluate our endeavours, our intelligence and the relationship between ourselves and the machines we build for the ambitions we have."

Also see:

• A paper by Alessandro Valli entitled "The Design of Natural Interaction" which examines how interactive digital media can be integrated into physical spaces.
• A paper by Mark Feldmeier and Joe Paradiso on the use of wearable sensors to create an interactive musical performance: "Ultra-Low-Cost Wireless Motion Sensors for Musical interaction with Very Large Groups."
• An overview of the design of hardware for Ubicomp by Roy Want and colleagues called "Disappearing Hardware."
• A description of the Smart-Its project for the augmentation of artefacts by Lars Erik Holmquist et al.: "Smart-Its Friends: A Technique for Users to Easily Establish Connections between Smart Artefacts."
• Höök, Kristina, Ståhl, Anna, Sundström, Petra, Laaksolahti, Jarmo (2008) Interactional Empowerment, To be presented at ACM SIGCHI conference Computer-Human Interaction (CHI2008), Florence, Italy, ACM Press, 2008.

General books about HCI :

• Baecker, R, Grudin, J, Buxton, W, Greenberg, S (eds) (1995) Readings in Human-Computer Interaction: Toward the Year 2000. 2nd ed. San Francisco: Morgan Kaufmann.
• Buxton, B (2007) Sketching User Experience: Getting the Design Right and the Right Design. San Francisco: Morgan Kaufmann.
• Carroll, JM (ed) (2002) Human-Computer Interaction in the New Millennium. New York: ACM Press.
• Dix, A, Finlay, J, Abowd, G and Beale, R (2003) Human-Computer Interaction. 3rd ed. Prentice Hall.
• Jacko, J and Sears, A (2007) Human-Computer Interaction Handbook. 2nd ed. Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum.
• Jones, M and Marsden G (2005) Mobile Interaction Design. London: Wiley & Sons.
• McCarthy, J and Wright, P (2004) Technology as Experience. Boston: MIT Press.
• Norman, D (2007) The Design of Future Things. New York: Basic Books.
• Norman, D (1988) The Psychology of Everyday Things. New York: Basic Books.
• Raskin, J, (2000) The Humane Interface: New directions for designing interactive systems. Boston: Addison-Wesley.
• Rogers, Y, Sharp, H, and Preece, J (2007) Interaction Design: Beyond Human Computer Interaction. 2nd ed. Hoboken, New Jersey: Wiley.
• Rosson, M and Carroll, J (2001) Usability Engineering: Scenario-Based Development of Human-Computer Interaction. New York: Morgan Kaufmann.
• Shneiderman, B (2002) Leonardo’s Laptop. Boston: MIT Press.
• Thimbleby, H (2007) Press On: Principles of interaction programming. Boston: MIT Press.
• Thomas, JC (1995) ‘Usability Engineering in 2020’ in Nielsen, J (ed), Advances in human-computer interaction. Norwood, New Jersey: Ablex (Intellect).