2008.08.13 | Marianne Dammand Iversen

Transparency – looking back at three decades of research

Since the early days of HCI, transparency has been a conceptual focus
and a concern for design - isit possible to make the computer go
away, be unnoticedto the human user? Should the computer be viewed as
a conversation partner or disappear just like we do not need to know
about car engines to drive a car? The mid-1980 brought alternatives
like the tool-perspective or the media perspective, and in my 1991
book, "Through the Interface", I proposed the wider perspective of
mediation asthe key to understanding and designing interaction.
Mediation and transparency continued to be debated on the
international scene. EU chose the "disappearing computer" to frame
their research program for pervasive computing, and the Palcom project
started from challenging this perspective. The so-called third wave of
HCI brought furtherchallenges to the perspective by proposing that
the computer should not go away, or disappear and the computing should
be noticeable, rather than unnoticed.
In the UUID project we have worked with new design principles for
mediation and ubiquitous instrumental interaction, and thetalk with
draw upon trajectories through the local and global history of HCI as
well on the most recent research.