The Three Paradigms of HCI

The Three Paradigms of HCI

By Steve Harrison, Phoebe Sengers  and Deborah Tatar

CHI 2007, April 28 – May 3, 2007, San Jose, USA

The paper first  explains how two major intellectual waves have formed the field of HCI, "the first orienting from engineering/human factors with its focus on optimizing man-machine fit, and the second stemming from cognitive science, with an increased emphasis on theory and on what is happening not only in the computer but, simultaneously, in the human mind", it then talks about a third new wave in HCI called the "phenomenological matrix", which already exists and used, but was not defined properly yet.

This third wave come into appearance because of new approaches that have been emerging in HCI and that don't fit correctly into the first two waves of thinking, such as user experience, embodied interaction, value-sensitive design, affective computing and ethnomethodology.

Comparing the three paradigms, the first one would see interaction as man-machine coupling, the second would treat interaction as information communication, and the third and new paradigm sees interaction as phenomenollogically situated.

One interesting point the authors make is that "new paradigms do not disprove the old paradigms, but instead provide alternative ways of thinking", which supports their argument that the third intellectual wave can co-exist with the other two.

The paper was an interesting reading since one is able to learn a little about the intellectual waves that gave birth to the HCI discipline, how these waves are still usable and valid and how new developments and ways of thinking call for a new paradigm to encompass these new advances.