DGPis40 Abigail Sellen talk

This is the second talk that I attended at the DGPis40 reunion conference which was by Abigail Sellen, Senior Researcher and Microsoft Research Cambridge.

Abigail talked about her stints at DGP as a post-doc where in the early '80s and '90s, she worked on Bill Buxton's Ontario Telepresence project. She is now at Microsoft Research Cambridge in the UK working on socio-digital systems and her talk is "Being Human in the Digital Age". Her research deals with how to bring humans into the loop of computer technologies and assist the human, a human-centered approach to computing which I think is much needed in our industry. She has 23 patents and she says that we have to think and change our methodologies towards HCI. We need to put a humanistic agenda in research.

In the past, the origins of HCI was about thinking the brain as an information processing system and using cognitive psychology (in the '70s and '80s) and human factors engineering. Then in the early '80s, Don Norman talked about HCI and Card, Moran and Newell (1984) wrote a book called the Psychology of HCI. The idea here was to use cognitive psychological models to improve the use of computers. These led to the following contributions to HCI: User-centered design, user-testing and modelling.

Now, we are in the age of ubiquitous computing as visioned by the late Mark Weiser from PARC. An example of this is the Augmented Reality kitchen from the MIT Media Lab. The problem with HCI is that we need a view of the user and understand users as cognitive machines, therefore we need to have multi-disciplinary terms and design goals for rich evolving ecosystems and practices. As a result of this, Abigail and her colleagues created a Whereabouts clock which allows each member of the family to see where others are (either work, school, or out) based on their location. They conducted a user study that showed that family members got reassurance of where everyone was.



In their research, they have opened up the view of the user and thought of new information appliances that they would have not thought before if there was not any user testing. Opening up to the user can lead to invention. Another example that they created is the digital postcard where people can send SMS of pictures and text and it will show on the postcard.



Another example is the kitchen postcard which they created which becomes an ambient display and blog space. Think of it like a digital version of putting stuff on the fridge.



They also created a visual answering machine called Bubbleboard where the size of the bubbles indicates the length of the message.



According to Abigail, long term studies in real homes can give new insight into value of technologies for people. Abigail says that we need to redefine the H,C and I in HCI. Can technologies help us to switch off, forget, be isolated, be engaged (the opposite of what technologies do for us but thinking about what it means to be human). We are so increasingly connected, but sometimes we just need to unwind and not be connected, we need a break. So this raises new questions for research and development. Therefore, we need an HCI based on human values.

Abigail and a bunch of other researchers explore this reincarnation of HCI (in my opinion) with their published document from their workshop called Being Human:Human Computer Interaction in the Year 2020 which can be downloaded. I'll for sure be reading this because my research is very much into this area with social networks and how we can bring social networks to mobile and ubiquitous computing.