Position paper: This is excerpted from a longer paper, entitled "The Design of Interaction", which will appear in the ACM97 book, *Beyond Calculation: 50 Years of Computing*, edited by Bob Metcalfe and Peter Denning (see ). I apologize for the discontinuities caused by excerpting, but didn't have time at the moment to write a smoother short version, and thought it was better to get something in soon, in response to Tom's request. --Terry Winograd ------- ... When digital computers first appeared a half-century ago, they were straightforwardly viewed as "machinery for computing." A computer could make short work of a task such as calculating ballistics trajectories or breaking codes, which previously required huge quantities of computation done by teams of human "computers." Even a quarter-century later, when the Internet was created, the network was seen primarily as a tool for facilitating remote computation. ... With the recent -- and quite sudden -- emergence of mass-appeal Internet-centered applications, it has become glaringly obvious that the computer is not a machine whose main purpose is to get a computing task done. The computer, with its attendant peripherals and networks, is a machine that provides new ways for people to communicate with other people. The excitement that infuses computing today comes from the exploration of new capacities to manipulate and communicate all kinds of information in all kinds of media, reaching new audiences in ways that would have been unthinkable before the computer. ... In some sense this should be no surprise, given what we can observe about human nature. People are primarily interested in other people, and are highly motivated to interact with them in whatever media are available. New technologies, from the telegraph to the World Wide Web have expanded our abilities to communicate widely, flexibly, and efficiently. This communication urge will continue to drive the expanding technology, with the advent of widespread 2-way video, wireless connectivity, and high bandwidth audio, video, 3-D imaging, and more yet to be imagined. ... There will always be a need for machinery and a need for software that runs on the machinery, but as the industry matures, these dimensions will take on the character of commodities, while the industry-creating innovations will be in what the hardware and software allow us to communicate. ..... The traditional idea of "interface" implies that we are focusing on two entities, the person and the machine, and on the space that lies between them. But beyond the interface, we operate in an "interspace" that is inhabited by multiple people, workstations, servers, and other devices in a complex web of interactions. In designing new systems and applications, we are not simply providing better tools for working with objects in a previously existing world. We are creating new worlds. Computer systems and software are becoming a medium for the creation of virtualities: the worlds in which users of the software perceive, act, and respond to experiences. ..... In the next fifty years, the increasing importance of designing spaces for human communication and interaction will lead to expansion in those aspects of computing that are focused on people, rather than machinery. The methods, skills, and techniques in these human aspects are generally foreign to those of heartland computer science, and it is likely that they will detach (at least partially) from their historical roots to create a new field of "interaction ... the computing industry will continue to broaden its boundaries -- from machinery, to software, to communication, to content. The companies that drive innovation will not be those that focus narrowly on technical innovation, but those that deal with the larger context in which the technologies are deployed. ... As the focus of commercial and practical interest continues to shift, so will the character of the people who will be engaged in the work. Many of the most exciting new research and development activities in computing will not be in traditional areas of hardware and software, but will be aimed at enhancing our ability to understand, analyze, and create interaction spaces. The work will be rooted in disciplines that focus on people and communication, such as psychology, communications, graphic design, and linguistics, as well as in the disciplines that support computing and communications technologies. .... Human-computer interaction is by necessity a field with interdisciplinary concerns, since its essence is interaction that includes people and machines; virtual worlds and computer networks; a diverse array of objects and behaviors. In the midst of this interdisciplinary collision, we can see the beginnings of a new profession, which might be called "interaction design." While drawing from many of the older disciplines, it has a distinct set of concerns and methods. ... Although there is no clear boundary between design and engineering, there is a critical difference in perspective (see Terry Winograd, *Bringing Design to Software,* 1996 ). All engineering and design activities call for the management of tradeoffs. In classical engineering disciplines, the tradeoffs can often be quantified: material strength, construction costs, rate of wear, and the like. In design disciplines, the tradeoffs are more difficult to identify and to measure because they rest on human needs, desires, and values. The designer stands with one foot in the technology and one foot in the domain of human concerns, and these two worlds are not easily commensurable. As well as being distinct from engineering, interaction design is not covered by the existing design fields either. If the computer user just looked at software, rather than operating it, traditional visual design would be at the center. If the spaces were actually physical, rather than virtual, then traditional product and architectural design would suffice. But computers have created a new medium -- one that is both active and virtual. Designers in this new medium need to develop principles and practices that are unique to the computer's scope and fluidity of interactivity. Architecture as we know it can be said to have started when the building technologies, such as stone cutting, made possible a new kind of building. Graphic design emerged as a distinct area of art when the printing press opened up the mass production of visual materials. Product design grew out of the development in the 20th century of physical materials such as plastics, which allowed designers to effectively create a vastly increased variety of forms for consumer objects. In a similar way, the computer has created a new domain of possibilities for creating spaces and interactions with unprecedented flexibility and immediacy. We have begun to explore this domain and to design many intriguing objects and spaces, from video games and word processors to "smart jewelry" and virtual reality simulations of molecules. But we are far from understanding it. A striking example at the time of this writing is the chaotic state of "web page design". The very name is misleading, in that it suggests that the world wide web is a collection of "pages," and therefore that the relevant expertise is that of the graphic designer or information designer. But the "page" today is often less like a printed page and more like a graphic user interface -- not something to look at, but something to interact with. The page designer needs to be a programmer with a mastery of computing techniques and programming languages such as Java. Yet, something more is missing in the gap between people trained in graphic arts, and people trained in programming. Neither group is really trained in understanding interaction as a core phenomenon. They know how to build programs and they know how to lay out text and graphics, but there is not yet a professional body of knowledge that underlies the design of effective interactions between people and machines, and among people using machines. With the emergence of interaction design in the coming decades, we will provide the foundation for the "page designers" of the future to master the principles and complexities of interaction and interactive spaces. ... Interaction design in the coming fifty years, will have an ideal to follow that combines the concerns and benefits of its many intellectual predecessors. Like the engineering disciplines, it needs to be practical and rigorous. Like the design disciplines, it needs to place human concerns and needs at the center of guiding design, and like the social disciplines, it needs to take a broad view of social possibilities and responsibilities. The challenge is large, as are the benefits. Given the record of how much computing has achieved in the last fifty years, we have every reason to expect this much of the future. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Short bio: Terry Winograd is Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University. His early research on natural language understanding by computers was a milestone in artificial intelligence, and he has written two books and numerous articles on that topic. His book, *Understanding Computers and Cognition: A New Foundation for Design* (Addison-Wesley, 1987, co-authored with Fernando Flores), took a critical look at work in artificial intelligence and suggested new directions for the design of computer systems and their integration into human activity. He co-edited a volume on usability with Paul Adler, (*Usability: Turning Technologies into Tools* Oxford, 1992). His most recent book,*Bringing Design to Software* (Addison-Wesley, 1996) brings together the perspectives of a number of leading proponents of software design. At Stanford, Winograd directs the Project on People, Computers, and Design, and the teaching and research program on Human-Computer Interaction Design. He is one of the principal investigators in the Stanford Digital Libraries Initative project, a collaboration with industrial partners to develop technologies for the future networked Digital Library. He was a founder of Action Technologies, a developer of workflow software, and was a founding member of Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility, of which he is a past national president. He is also a consultant to Interval Research Corporation, on the national advisory board of the Association for Software Design, and on the editorial board of several journals, including Human-Computer Interaction and Computer-Supported Cooperative Work. --------