I write this in Atlanta, a city I’m sharing with some 15,000 haematologists attending their annual meeting. They would all have been in New Orleans had it not been for Hurricane Katrina. Next year’s CHI conference, whose organizing committee meeting I’m attending, will be a lot smaller than this. But it will probably be a good deal broader in scope; and thereby hangs a tale.

Coming late to HCI, I missed the first five years of CHI conferences. It was only around 1991 that I started delving into the proceedings of past conferences, usually to look for the answers to questions I’d encountered in my research. And it was then that I first experienced a problem.

Each of my forays into the CHI proceedings would run much the same course. When I had a question, I’d first ask my Xerox colleagues, and if that failed I’d head for the shelf of CHI proceedings in the library. I’d look through the table of contents of each volume. I’d see interesting-looking papers, and would often get side-tracked into reading them, but I never found the answer to my question.

In retrospect, even then the coverage of HCI was so broad that questions were far outnumbering answers. It was a matter of too wide a range of technology, and too broad a range of users, performing too many different tasks. And not enough researchers. If it was bad then, it’s much worse now. At this weekend’s meetings I heard two people — quite unprompted by me – describe the same experience as mine.

Back in 1991, I was thinking about the case histories in Vincenti’s What Engineers Know and How They Know It. Compared with 1990s CHI authors, his 1930s aeronautics researchers seemed much more tightly focused on providing answers to designers’ questions. Was this simply because aircraft design then was different from interactive system design now? Or was there a more fundamental reason? Would I find a similar difference between HCI and other branches of recent engineering research?

Starting in 1992, I began reading through engineering proceedings and journals, and through the CHI proceedings, classifying the results of papers. I didn’t read every paper in detail, and in any case most of the engineering papers were beyond me, but I could understand what they were offering the reader. And in most cases they offered an analytical model that provided a more accurate way for the designer to predict the performance of some kind of engineering artifact: an integrated circuit, a heat exchanger, a nuclear reactor component, an earth-filled dam. Ninety percent of the papers described an improved predictive model, or an improved tool for applying a model. These papers were trying to help designers achieve performance targets.

When I looked at what CHI papers were offering, I found a big difference. There were indeed papers on improved models, but they represented less than 10 percent. Instead, over two thirds of the papers presented results of a kind I hadn’t found in any engineering papers:

• radically new designs for interactive systems and interaction techniques
• findings from empirical studies that had not yet been reduced to a predictive model

I reported this discovery, explained my ‘pro-forma based’ method of classification, and offered my initial thoughts on implications for HCI — in a CHI paper! More on this next week.