At CHI 2008, Anker Helms Jørgensen and Brad Myers organized a SIG meeting on user interface history, with the goal of launching a concerted effort towards creating a history of user interfaces and human-computer interaction.
The organizers made the point that efforts at HCI history so far, while very useful, have been sporadic and done by HCI insiders (e.g. Ron Baecker, Jonathan Grudin). As the field matures it could profit by engaging with historians and related groups, such as the Society for the History of Technology. Another common observation was that HCI history so far tends to focus on a few highlights (PARC, GUI, mouse, sketchpad) and neglects a lot of the variety that used to exist.
Slides, a short bibliography, and other materials from the SIG are up at a new UI History blog created by Anker Helms Jørgensen.
I attended the SIG and found it to be a really interesting discussion and effort. There was also an HCI history course at CHI, taught by Jonathan Grudin, but I didn't manage to attend this.
Related links (pulled from Anker and Brad's slides):
- UIST conference 20-year history archive by Michel Beaudouin-Lafon and Wendy Mackay
- The Interaction Museum
- Open Video Project (University of Maryland)
- Computer History Museum (in Palo Alto, CA)
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