Audience

Information & Interaction Design

Mick McQuaid

mcq@utexas.edu

University of Texas at Austin

08 Sep 2026

Week THREE

But first … A public service announcement

But first … Draw a face

It was supposed to convince you that you can draw

Some of you didn’t need it

Some of you didn’t submit examples of good design!

Some needed better scans

Some need the exercises in Dodson (2006)

Crazy Eights

\(\langle\) Pause for video \(\rangle\)

Annotated! And speedy!

Easy to understand at a glance

Pencil or not?

Audience

Main (Old) Academic Communities

Human Factors in Schools of Engineering

Human Computer Interaction in Schools of Computer Science & in iSchools

Management Information Systems in Schools of Business

Human Factors

People operating complex machines
- automobiles
- ships
- planes
- nuclear reactors

Reaction time

Situational awareness

Split-second decision making

Human Computer Interaction

Evolved from ideal user to communities

Started by cognitive psychologists

First home was in computer science

Management Information Systems

Adoption of technological innovation

Diffusion of technological innovation

Always in productive organization context

Concerned with management of technology

Academic communities new to HCI

Visual Design in Schools of Art & Design

Studies of groups of people in Sociology and Social Work

Product Design groups in Business Schools

These are not new communities but they have only recently branched into HCI or, more commonly UX. Since they don’t have much history in HCI/UX, I don’t have much to say about them but they do matter in the current landscape. Their long history in their parent areas gives a clue about their likely contribution to HCI/UX.

Epochs in Human Computer Interaction

The idealized individual

The casual individual

Workgroups

Ubiquitous Computing

Communities of Practice

Communities of Place

It’s easier to identify past epochs than current ones. It appears that human computer interaction has diverged into two areas in the current era but the distinction is harder to be certain of without the advantage of years of hindsight. The two current branches appear to be ubiquitous computing and computing communities.

Ubiquitous computing is an old term referring to computers embedded in other devices and able to communicate with each other. When first coined by Marc Weiser around 1991 (see Weiser (1991)), the term meant anything that was not a desktop computer and concerned a small, well-defined community. Today, almost no interaction between computers and people can be defined with respect to only a desktop computer, rendering the original definition moot. Now it seems to encompass all computing.

Community computing is not a broadly used term by itself. I am using it here to refer to the change in focus from a single person (formerly a user) to many people forming a community. Two types of communities exist, communities that occur in computer networks and communities that exist in the physical world. Since the latter may share sewers, electrical utilities, telecommunications utilities, roads, schools, local governments, and other aspects of physical infrastructure, it differs greatly from a network-only community such as Facebook.

Communities that can function remotely, such as Facebook, are the focus of study of Social Network Analysis and Data Science, closely related fields whose work is enabled by monitoring electronic communication networks.

Communities that exist in physical space, such as neighborhoods and cities, are obviously the subject of study of architects, social workers, and people in many other disciplines. Recently, many of these researchers and their sponsors have aligned with computer scientists identified with human computer interaction.

Note that the above bifurcation is a matter of opinion. Many different perspectives exist about how to divide the academic community, such as the tracks of CHI. Most of the perspectives that I (Mick) have encountered divide the community into a very large number of segments. You should develop your own perspective with exposure to the community.

Industrial and Government Communities

You want me to deprioritize my current reports until you advise of a status upgrade?

Make these your primary action items.

— dialog from Fight Club, 1999

Suppliers of IT

Who are suppliers of IT today? How do you measure? Public awareness? Market Capitalization? What industry codes are applicable?

Customers of IT

This group can best be defined by students.

Historical perspective, revisited

idealized user

casual user

workgroup

groups in general

ambient computing

Idealized user

The idealized user was studied intensively by Herbert Simon and his associates at Carnegie-Mellon. They broke tasks into very small components and investigated the state of mind of users at every moment.

Nondiscretionary use

Labor was cheap

Machines were expensive

Therefore, make labor more efficient

Hierarchical collaboration

1980s

Most HCI work funded by DoD

Collaborating in rigidly defined hierarchies

Workgroup cooperation

Partly a reaction to DoD-funded research

Partly a generalization

Workgroups without a rigid hierarchy

Discretionary computing

Games

Non-workplace activities

Driven by falling price of computers

Ubiquitous computing

Mark Weiser’s famous article coined the term

Raised awareness that cheap computers everywhere were the future

Principles:
- The purpose of a computer is to help you do something else.
- The best computer is a quiet, invisible servant.
- The more you can do by intuition the smarter you are; the computer should extend your unconscious.
- Technology should create calm.

Communities of Practice

E.g., radiologists adopting new technology

Requires extensive knowledge of each discipline

Communities of Life

Community development, such as preached by Saul Alinsky, precedes the HCI community’s interest.

To distinguish between communities of practice and communities of life, let’s consider the phenomenon of community development which gained a higher media profile when a community organizer was elected President of the USA in 2008. Community development was again highlighted when a presidential candidate in 2012 claimed to have had a real job in contrast to the President’s job as a community organizer. Of course, mainstream media presents a confused picture of community organizers as socialists, terrorists, and even vegans.

A clearer picture of community development comes from speaking directly with community organizers, who can be found throughout the USA, especially in areas impacted by poverty. I (Mick) have been privileged to speak with a few and, although I have not read much of their literature, I am confident in describing one aspect of community development.

Communities and infrastructure

housing

health care facilities

quality of air and water

postal and shipping services

roads

other transportation facilities

schools

utilities

waste removal

sewage

watershed maintenance

Communities are complicated, fragile entities. They depend on investment from businesses and the presence of productive enterprise. A number of factors can drive businesses away from a community and, when any of these factors appears, others are likely to follow. Collectively, we can call most of these factors deficiencies in infrastructure. Infrastructure includes housing, health care facilities, quality of air and water, postal and shipping services, roads, other transportation facilities, schools, utilities, waste removal, sewage, watershed maintenance, and probably several others.

The one thing I have omitted from the above list is people. Specifically, a community must have a high proportion of its members in the workforce, meaning that a high proportion of its members must be of an age, 18–65, to be eligible for the workforce. Children and the elderly need care and, if a community consists mainly of members in these age groups, who will care for them?

If any of the above infrastructure elements is missing, the others are threatened. Working age parents will often refuse to settle in otherwise attractive communities that lack highly-rated schools. Businesses can not meet their schedules in a community suffering frequent brownouts or blackouts.

Community organizers

Work at a very small scale

Are rarely successful at bringing families out of poverty

Suffer from stovepiping

At the right, we see one community organizer who became very successful.

Community organizers are typically not very successful. One community organizer told me that, if she could help a single family out of poverty, she would consider it an important and infrequent accomplishment. If she could help a dozen families out of poverty, she would have a successful career. These are dauntingly small numbers.

Most efforts at community development suffer from a phenomenon named just like a somewhat similar problem in information technology, stovepiping. This means that any single initiative tackles one of the above infrastructure problems. The results are usually irrelevant to the health of the community as a whole because the complicated, interdependent relationships between the people and the infrastructure elements are more sensitive to damage than to repair. A substantial number of elements must be improved to support any given individual element.

It is very difficult to avoid stovepiping in community development as it is information technology. People usually have expertise in one domain, access to resources in one domain, and a mandate in one domain.

Upskilling as a community solution

Risks depleting the community of employment age individuals

Attracts industries that may not help the community

As an example, many community development efforts focus on improving skills of individuals to make them more employable. One problem with the jobs/skills approach is that historically it has actually weakened poverty-challenged communities, since programs like this are used by the brightest and fastest learners as an exit strategy from the community. One big challenge is how to add skills without creating an exodus from the community. There is no easy answer, but the jobs / skills focus might help if the skills have an immediate local application. The problem is that to keep the newly skilled you have to add roads, housing, sewers, fast internet access, cell-phone towers, and everything else that businesses need to move into the area and employ people locally.

One horrible example in my (Mick’s) experience is Tucson, AZ, which made the decision a long time ago to attract “call centers” that semi-retired military people there could work for part-time. These call centers became the biggest private industry in Tucson and they don’t train anybody to do much of anything, and they feature high turnover and low wages. Seniority is a problem for management because of demands for increasing wages with experience, so they routinely lay off the more experienced workers seasonally and bring them back with a new clock the following year.

Communities of place and HCI

HCI history

HCI has made a conscious decision to try to make a difference to communities

High-profile HCI projects have struggled to make a difference to communities

All of the foregoing leads to a definition of communities of life as depending on a fragile, complicated network of physical infrastructure and working-age people for health. Notice that this is a normative definition of community. You may feel that it has delved too deeply into details for a course in human computer interaction. I assure you that, if anything, it does not provide enough details. The community of practice known as HCI has made a conscious and long-term decision throughout the past two decades to try to make a difference to communities of life. All too often, these efforts have led nowhere because of an inadequate appreciation of the details of challenges faced by communities of life. Many high-profile HCI projects have struggled for this reason and a few have enjoyed success. I’ll list a few examples.

A project in Kenya involving HCI students from Michigan was concerned with the uncertainty faced by small farmers selling milk at a distant market. Picture this: A small farmer trudges down a dusty road with a single animal laden with a couple of barrels of milk. Pretty soon, he is met by a man in distress. Through his tears, the man explains that the bottom has dropped out of the milk market from which he is returning and that he was forced to sell his milk as well as his only animal for almost nothing. He shows the farmer a pittance in his gnarled hand and walks on. Now the farmer is shaken and, before the piteous cries of the man have died away, he meets a jolly yokel. The yokel says that he is thinking about dairy farming and wants to buy an animal and some milk with the all the money he has saved. That amount turns out to be considerably less than the farmer had hoped for at market, but more than pitiful man had claimed to receive. So the farmer takes the small price and considers himself lucky, unsure whether he has been bilked by a pair of con men or has narrowly averted disaster.

The project realized that anyone could get a cell phone in this region and that even the poorest of the farmers had one. It was a small step from there to setting up a dial-in service (no, there was no wifi in this rural district) that texts the current market price of milk to a caller on even the most primitive cell phone. The farmer need not even be literate to take advantage of this system, just numerate.

A Ph.D. student in HCI at Stanford was funded to do a project with free cell phones in a rural district in India. She was herself Indian in origin, although she was operating in a completely unfamiliar state. These phones, running the old Symbian operating system, could support \(240\times160\) video. Her plan was to provide health education to illiterate pregnant women using the videos. She even persuaded local officials of a rank of approximately mayor (I don’t know the correct term) to record videos endorsing her project.

The project was a resounding failure because she did not understand household relations. The husband’s mother typically lived with the family and was the final authority on health care for the pregnant wife. By bypassing the mother-in-law and going directly to the pregnant woman, she believed she was appealing to a new generation more open to contemporary health practices. Instead, she was threatening the dominion of the mother-in-law, whose authority in the household kept her clothed and fed in a society that offered her no alternative. The mothers-in-law, feeling threatened with displacement, proved to be dedicated, relentless foes of the project, no matter the health benefits.

By the time the Ph.D.~student came to understand the dynamic, the funding had dried up, preventing her from trying in a different rural community where she could make the mothers-in-law the focal point of the plan.

Also in India, a well-known HCI scholar (from Berkeley?) devised a microfinance system around a series of paper forms with QR codes, a cell phone for each village, a tiny wooden platform for aiming the phone at the papers, a single printer serving many villages, and the Indian postal system to deliver the printed forms. This initiative brought together a small group of women in each village who would collectively save money and decide on small purchases. It took advantage of the presence of the postal system to overcome the issue of printing forms and used QR codes as an information storage and transmission system, enabled by the ubiquitous give-away phones running Symbian, an operating system too primitive to appeal to first-world consumers. The developer used the phone and wooden platform as an excuse to bring the group together to converse and make financial decisions, knowing that these meetings might have the potential to serve other purposes.
Finally, an Indian example I had the misfortune to witness (and reported on previously) was a CHI design competition where an Indian student had devised a hardware / software platform to assist bus conductors in a rural state. This was a small tablet-like device that would be carried by the conductor who would talk to the passengers to learn their destinations and enter them into the device, and be able to shout out stops to the driver at appropriate times. It was a complicated bottlenecky system. To show the audience that there were conductors on buses and that crowding on buses made it difficult to communicate stops, he showed many slides to illustrate. When someone asked why not let passengers communicate with their cell phones and remove the bottleneck, he explained that rural Indians were too poor to afford cell phones, a claim contradicted by dozens of the people pictured in his slides! He was also an example of a person who would not let his teammates speak, preferring to control the entire presentation and question-answer session. I have to think that he needed to acquire more sensitivity to the population he was trying to serve as well as to the colleagues with whom he was trying to do important work.

An observant student pointed out that Irani et al. (2010) describes a similar incident in rural India where HCI professionals tried to improve the lives of poverty-stricken people with water quality problems. When they could not find poverty-stricken people with water problems (!), they took their pre-existing solution to these problems elsewhere. Irani et al. (2010) tells a few such stories of postcolonial computing in this fascinating paper. Merritt and Bardzell (2011) offers theoretical support for thinking about HCI4D.

To summarize, communities of life can be served by HCI, but not without seeking some understanding of complicated fragile networks of infrastructure that account for so much of the variation in health between communities.

Disabilities: Permanent, Temporary, Situational, and Cognitive

Disability-specific design

UT-Austin is notable as a disability-friendly campus, according to https://www.collegeconsensus.com/rankings/best-disability-friendly-colleges/

Approaches to disability-specific design

Shinohara et al. (2016) identified four different approaches to disability-specific design and listed some of the research in each approach, which I will repeat here:

universal design: Bigelow (2012), Mace et al. (1991)

user-sensitive inclusive design: Newell and Gregor (2000), Newell et al. (2011)

design for user empowerment: Ladner (2015)

ability-based design: Wobbrock et al. (2011)

Other design approaches of note

value-sensitive design: Friedman (1996)

design for social acceptance: Shinohara (2012)

Popularization via bad design

Norman (2013) popularized the identification of bad design in its first edition in the eighties.

Don Norman is the single person who has done the most to popularize HCI in the public consciousness. He is a brilliant thinker and I don’t mean to criticize him for this, but one thing he did that brought him amazing popularity yet did little to educate people was to popularize the discussion of poor design. His most popular book is fraught with examples of bad design and it is inevitable that any teacher of HCI can boost course evals by allowing students to waste a lot of time critiquing bad design. The problem with this is that it is so hard to get design right that noticing that much of it is poor is, by itself, a minute step.

Most bad design examples remind us of the importance of signifiers and the danger of cognitive dissonance.

There is that aspect of a thing you can interact with that suggests how to interact with it

It can be done well or poorly

It is the central concept for individual user

It is often skeuomorphic

Flat design opposes notion of need for signifiers

Flat design risks

Bad door

Bad and less bad door

Anti-ADA door

Bad dryer

Bad iPad

Bad iPad’s ancestor

Bad elevators

Hotel showers

END

References

Bigelow, Kimberly Edginton. 2012. “Designing for Success: Developing Engineers Who Consider Universal Design Principles.” Journal of Postsecondary Education and Disability 25 (3).

Dodson, Bert. 2006. Keys to Drawing with Imagination. North Light.

Friedman, Batya. 1996. “Value-Sensitive Design.” Interactions 3 (6): 16–23.

Irani, Lilly, Janet Vertesi, Paul Dourish, Kavita Philip, and Rebecca E. Grinter. 2010. “Postcolonial Computing: A Lens on Design and Development.” Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (New York, NY, USA), CHI ’10, 1311–20. https://doi.org/10.1145/1753326.1753522.

Ladner, Richard E. 2015. “Design for User Empowerment.” Interactions (New York, NY, USA) 22 (2): 24–29. https://doi.org/10.1145/2723869.

Mace, Ronald L., Graeme J. Hardie, and Jaine P. Place. 1991. “Accessible Environments: Toward Universal Design.” In Design Interventions: Toward a More Humane Architecture, edited by W. E. Preiser, J. C. Vischer, and E. T. White. Van Nostrand Reinhold.

Merritt, Samantha, and Shaowen Bardzell. 2011. “Postcolonial Language and Culture Theory for HCI4D.” CHI ’11 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (New York, NY, USA), CHI EA ’11, 1675–80. https://doi.org/10.1145/1979742.1979827.

Newell, A. F., P. Gregor, M. Morgan, G. Pullin, and C. Macaulay. 2011. “User-Sensitive Inclusive Design.” Univers. Access Inf. Soc. (Berlin, Heidelberg) 10 (3): 235–43. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10209-010-0203-y.

Newell, Alan F., and Peter Gregor. 2000. “"User Sensitive Inclusive Design"—in Search of a New Paradigm.” Proceedings on the 2000 Conference on Universal Usability (New York, NY, USA), CUU ’00, 39–44. https://doi.org/10.1145/355460.355470.

Norman, Donald A. 2013. The Design of Everyday Things, 2nd Edition. Basic Books.

Shinohara, Kristen. 2012. “A New Approach for the Design of Assistive Technologies: Design for Social Acceptance.” SIGACCESS Access. Comput. (New York, NY, USA), no. 102 (January): 45–48. https://doi.org/10.1145/2140446.2140456.

Shinohara, Kristen, Cynthia L. Bennett, and Jacob O. Wobbrock. 2016. “How Designing for People with and Without Disabilities Shapes Student Design Thinking.” Proceedings of the 18th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (New York, NY, USA), ASSETS ’16, 229–37. https://doi.org/10.1145/2982142.2982158.

Weiser, Mark. 1991. “The Computer for the 21st Century.” Scientific American (New York, NY, USA), 94–104.

Wobbrock, Jacob O., Shaun K. Kane, Krzysztof Z. Gajos, Susumu Harada, and Jon Froehlich. 2011. “Ability-Based Design: Concept, Principles and Examples.” ACM Trans. Access. Comput. (New York, NY, USA) 3 (3): 9:1–27. https://doi.org/10.1145/1952383.1952384.

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