I wrote this short book to provide practitioners and researchers a broad familiarity with the evolution of several fields that have contributed to HCI, their similarities and differences, and patterns over time that can help us address the opportunities, challenges, and surprises to come.

Writing topic overviews consumed years and several journal article equivalents of analysis and insight.
Two of these Canadian luminaries tired of my requests that they update their previous edition and invited me to join them.

Powerful use of a typology of Joseph McGrath.

A technology that did not succeed, and the difficulty of publishing negative outcomes that impedes our collective progress.

This brings creative arts and experimental psychology, including dream analysis, to bear on the usefulness of personas.

Overview of research on organizational uses of IM, weblogs, wikis, and social networking sites.

A monumental book, now in its fourth edition.
Robert Glushko is on the faculty of the Berkeley School of Information.

A comprehensive examination of how and why different research communities arose and evolved. This was rewritten and extended in From Tool to Partner: The Evolution of Human-Computer Interaction.

What began as a simple review led to some new insights.
For 30 years, Steve Poltrock and I collaborated in conducting and reviewing CSCW research.

The first version of my HCI history to add the field of Information Science to human factors, management information systems, and computer science. Extended and update in From Tool to Partner: The Evolution of Human-Computer Interaction.

Lilia Efimova was an early blogger and analyst of new media.

AIS SIGHCI was forming as I was starting to explore MIS HCI history. This was incorporated into later treatments.

An overview of CSCW perspectives, recognizing that the information tsunami was just beginning.

Anne, Carolyn, and Evan were Microsoft colleagues.

Reprinted from the 1997 first edition, my first effort to think organizationally on a broad scale.
M. Lynne Markus is at Bentley University.

Seeking to understand the CHI-human factors gap, I came to feel that the  discretion (or lack of it) in use was at the heart of it.

Leysia Palen is on the faculty of the University of Colorado.

A review of an ambitious embedded knowledge project that eventually collided with the Web.
With Gerhard Fischer’s talented group at Colorado.

A book in honor of Masanao Toda, author of the wonderful ‘fungus-eater’ and other essays.

Five years after early surveys, an update.

An encyclopedia article mostly distilled from our 1997 survey.

Adds a fourth development context to those in my 1991 Computer article.

A concise account of challenges and a cautious forecast. The only article I’ve revisited without wanting to wordsmith.

Extended version of a CSCW’92 paper of the same name. I worked on experiments with the system designed by my NTT co-authors.

Learning experiences from years of working in UX design and development.

Observations on conference and journal publication after six years editing ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction.

Proposes a conference reviewing process that could be an improvement, after summarizing analyses in earlier essays.

From a memorial issue for a pioneer who was always considerate and gracious.

John King, now at Michigan, Suzanne Iacono, now a manager at NSF, and I were UCI colleagues of Rob Kling.

My first full-length article, building on a 2004 encyclopedia article, prior to incorporating library and information science.

This system came to be used internally for presentation capture for a time.
Yong Rui, Anoop Gupta, and Li-wei He were colleagues at Microsoft Research.

Not about the TV show, this makes a case for linking personas to participatory design.

Synthesizes work from several earlier papers.
Liz Sanocki is a UX designer and lecturer, Francis Li an interaction designer/software engineer.

If link is behind a paywall, the author’s version.
This invited commentary on a published article was an early approach to what the key issue affecting the uses of digital media, IMO.

An early work focused on social aspects of information retrieval.
A multi-disciplinary team from Boeing, Microsoft, University of Washington, and Risø National Laboratory.

The Multimedia Annotation paper above, the final overview of the MRAS lecture annotation system, is a better place to start and may still reward reading.

My first large-scale qualitative study. Some of the anguished remarks that we quoted could be heard today.

A misleading description of my 1989 consistency case led me to further develop it.

This Dagstuhl workshop product examines a wide range of ways that technology and people can be integrated, and where we could go from here.

Further reading: Successful adoption is discussed in this 2002 paper with Leysia Palen.

This initiated explorations of HCI history over the following 25 years, reported in several publications.

These issues loom larger as displays grow and information streams proliferate.

Extends my best-known work on groupware adoption.

An elegant article by an historical linguist on the forces that shape languages provides insights into the forces that shape interaction design.

My first published HCI study applying a method of physiological psychologist Tony Deutsch that showed that design can trump efficiency.
Allan MacLean became a software entrepreneur.

 A multi-faceted case study written to be a teaching example.

A cross-sectional trend study finds that social media user concerns have shifted, but otherwise behavior patterns have become more settled.
Hui Zhang is a taxonomist at Amazon, Munmun De Choudhury is on the Georgia Tec faculty.

Anne Archambault was a group manager at Microsoft.

Multitaskers who know that they miss useful information multitask nonetheless.

Shamsi Iqbal is a Microsoft researcher, Eric Horvitz directs the Redmond lab.

Erika Poole was then at Georgia Tech.

If the link is behind a firewall, the authors’ version.

Explores easier approaches to controlling information access.
Prasun Dewan is at UNC-Chapel Hill.

Studies that suggested effective approaches to mixed-initiative access control.
Judy Olson was visiting from University of Michigan and went on to UC Irvine.

Shari Tallarico is an ethnographer, Scott Counts a colleague.

Subtle issues that slowed video adoption. We expressed optimism that was borne out, though progress remained uneven.

Reviewers loved early papers that emphasized the promise of this technology, but it was more difficult to publish the challenges that eventually stopped the research. The full story is published in Grudin & Bargeron 2005.

More complete study published in Multimedia Systems.

More observation and less interview transcript analysis might have been better, but it turned out fine.
A multi-disciplinary team from Boeing, Microsoft, University of Washington, and Risø National Laboratory in Denmark.

Preventing student procrastination in using an asynchronous tool.
Scott LeeTiernan has evolved into Scott Counts.

Once upon a time, managers were not hands-on computer users. Now most are. The change facilitates some things and creates new challenges.

Tracey Lovejoy is an ethnographer.

Shared text annotation to support students in a university course.
A Microsoft team joined by Alan Borning of the University of Washington.

Shared text annotation in support of development and test teams.

This paper on the MRAS system was extended in the 2002 Journal of MIS article.

Our system encountered unexpected resistance by a few colleagues with strong privacy issues.

Reducing counter-productive procrastination in the use of an asynchronous tool.

Used successfully in Microsoft Research’s large lecture room.

An analysis of years of data from internal training video use that provided insights into how to organize presentation material.

Contrasts four approaches to delivering lecture summaries.

A remote lecture support tool evolved through use in internal training courses.

Study of large-scale use of annotations by a large development team.

Students attending synchronous lectures on standard platforms of 2000 could outperform those in classroom settings.

Automation of video highlight extraction. This complements the 1999 time-compression paper below.

A reduced set of features appeared in Windows Media Player and are now widely available.

Gloria Mark is on the faculty of UC Irvine, Steve Poltrock and I have long collaborated.

For a more complete account see He, Grudin & Gupta (2000), Designing presentations for on-demand viewing.

The Multimedia Annotation paper above, the final overview of the MRAS lecture annotation system, is a better place to start and may still reward reading.

The MRAS (asynchronous lecture annotation) system and first study. Subsequent papers listed above are better sources, such as Multimedia Annotation…

More complete version, same title, published in 2000 (above).

First publication of ClearBoard design and evaluation. A more comprehensive treatment is in 1993 journal article of same name.

My first research at Microsoft was on the design and use of distance learning tools. Some of what we learned 20 years ago is relevant in the pandemic.

A look at forces that can impede the adoption of innovative technologies and practices in education. These include customers not understanding the needs of users (teachers and students), competing priorities that platform builders face, and historical inertia that constrains educational practices.

This essay reviews past efforts to bridge HCI communities in different disciplines, primarily through conference attendance. This reviews and analyzes that history and suggests that joint short-term, large-scale hackathon-like events might be a better way to foster knowledge transfer.

Further reading: This paper focuses on the general version of a problem that inspired the original paper.

Further reading: The case is extended in this note, analyzed here, and placed in a larger context in this article.

Further reading: A fourth development context.

Who would have thought? User centered design approaches of Henry Ford and Howard Hughes that we invented?

I used the dialogue approach of Plato to discuss the effects of new technology, and set the record straight on what Socrates and Plato felt about writing, with parallels to digital technology.

Implications for design as we enter a new phase in our relationship with technology.

Umer Farooq is a senior design researcher at Microsoft.

Over forty years, technology has changed academic life for better and worse.

Technology can threaten some jobs without affecting overall employment.

How technology could be amplifying the Peter Principle.

Lillian Gilbreth and Grace Hopper, their contributions and context.
Gayna Williams is founder of If She Can I Can and Swash Consulting.

Conferences invading the ecological niche of journals. What might biologists say?

Gloria Mark, from UC Irvine, John Riedl, from the University of Minnesota, and I were CSCW 2012 program co-chairs.

Effects of waves of technology adoption, illustrated by oscillating ties in the field of CSCW.

The content of Computer Supported Cooperative Work has changed over the years.

HCI at the beginning of the computer era; ACM scans in early proceedings.

The history of AI suggests a past rivalry for resources, and decent prospects for a future alliance.

A fresh look at contributions of Vannevar Bush, Ivan Sutherland, and Doug Engelbart.

This conference signaled to me that HCI was on a path to domain-specific basic research. (This has proven to be true, though more slowly in CHI than elsewhere.)

An observation that publishers’ policies and practices were not keeping up with technology change.

Gazing into a crystal ball.

How we continually underestimate the impact of Moore’s Law and associated legislation.

The relationship of AI and HCI, elaborated in an AI Magazine essay.

The parent organization of ACM and IEEE, and the disease that killed it.

How did the once-massive minicomputer industry disappear?

For my first history column, as a test, I wanted to see if I could say something new about a field I’m not in.

This invited article, based on my 2005 Annals of the History of Computing paper, led to the Timelines series of columns, most written by other authors.

An essay covering social and cognitive aspects of information visibility.

The complexity of the effects of awareness and visibility discussed here are still under-appreciated.

The evolution of technologies digital and non-digital.
Don Gentner was a friend and collaborator from my first months in graduate school until he died in 2005.

Unintended consequences of terminology choices.

An overview of CSCW with illustrations and links to resources, in an online encyclopedia.

A panel discussing the effects of technology on how we think. I’m the optimist.

The inspired creators of this video were interns back then.

This blog post examines the challenges faced by our high schools in shifting to pedagogies to instill critical thinking, communication, and collaboration skills: The content of what is taught is increasingly not what students will find useful.

This blog post describes how my interest in HCI history developed, leading to the book From Tool to Partner: The Evolution of Human-Computer Interaction. Potential benefits from reading it and the challenge of writing an objective account of a time we lived through are covered.

Written just after sending in the final edits to my book From Tool to Partner: The Evolution of Human-Computer Interaction, this blog post briefly describes the book, then identifies some peculiarities of the English language that the copy editors and I had to work out.

A version of this online blog later appeared in  print in ACM Interactions, 2016, 23, 1, 6-7.