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The Formation of ACM SIGCHI
In 1980, substantial numbers of cognitive psychologists had very recently formed or joined HCI
research groups at Xerox PARC, IBM Watson, Bell Laboratories, Digital Equipment Corporation,
the Medical Research Council Applied Psychology Unit, and University of California, San Diego.
The ACM Special Interest Group for Social and Behavioral Computing (SIGSOC), formed in
1969, focused on computers as discretionary tools for doing research. By the late 1970s, behav-
ioral and social scientists with this interest were numerous enough to hold meetings in their pro-
fessional association meetings, reducing SIGSOC activity (Borman, 1996). A 1980 SIGSOC
workshop included research into software design and use. In 1982 SIGSOC was rechristened
SIGCHI (considered more pronounceable than the alternative acronym that would have put the
human before the computer, SIGHCI).
The first CHI conference, in 1983,
2
was dominated by cognitive psychologists. Two-thirds of
the papers were from people working in industry, primarily in computer, software, and telecom-
munications companies (the latter promoted uses of digital data via modem and developed con-
sumer software and hardware such as Unix and the short-lived Unix PC). Human factors and
ergonomics was present. CHI '83 was co-sponsored by ACM and the Human Factors Society. The
program committee was chaired by Richard Pew and included Sid Smith and other prominent
HFS members. Brian Shackel and HFS President Robert Williges gave half-day pre-conference
tutorials. “Human Factors in Computing Systems” was (and is) the conference subtitle.
However, few human factors researchers remained active in CHI. In the influential
Psychology
of Human Computer Interaction
, published earlier in 1983, Card, Moran, and Newell wrote:
“Human factors specialists, ergonomists, and human engineers will find that we have synthesized
ideas from modern cognitive psychology and artificial intelligence with the old methods of task
analysis . . . The user is not an operator. He does not operate the computer, he communicates with
it . . .” (p. viii). This was a theoretical as well as conceptual rebuke. Human factors researchers
were trained when radical behaviorism dominated American psychology and were generally
antipathetic to cognitive theory.
Two years later, Newell and Card (1985) noted that human factors had a role in design but
“classical human factors . . . has all the earmarks of second-class status . . . (Our approach) avoids
continuation of the classical human-factors role (by transforming) the psychology of the interface
into a hard science” (p. 221). Card recently said, “Human factors was the discipline we were try-
ing to improve,” and “I personally changed the (CHI Conference) call in 1986 so as to emphasize
computer science and reduce the emphasis on cognitive science, because I was afraid that it would
just become human factors again” (personal e-mail, June 2004).
Card, Moran, and Newell modeled repetitive activities of expert users. Although highly
respected and often cited, human performance models never drew a major active following in
CHI, which focused mainly on discretionary use by novices, the concern of the burgeoning soft-
ware market.
“Hard science, in the form of engineering, drives out soft science, in the form of human fac-
tors” (Newell and Card, 1985, p. 212). There was a palpable sense that human factors was a dis-
cipline of lower status. “Cognitive engineering” and “usability engineering” were introduced.
Many who had called themselves human factors engineers left CHI or adopted the title “usability
engineer.” I was among those who shifted from publishing in the human factors literature to CHI
and
Communications of the ACM
until new journals were established.
At IBM Watson, John Gould had been a leader in the hardware-oriented human factors tradition
since the late 1960s. Gould participated in CHI, but remained active in human factors, serving as
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