{"id":40945,"date":"2015-09-08T08:45:04","date_gmt":"2015-09-08T08:45:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.massarate.ma\/?p=40945"},"modified":"2015-09-08T08:45:04","modified_gmt":"2015-09-08T08:45:04","slug":"humanizing-technology-a-history-of-human-computer-interaction","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.massarate.ma\/humanizing-technology-a-history-of-human-computer-interaction.html","title":{"rendered":"Humanizing Technology: A History of Human-Computer Interaction"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/p>\n
The march of progress in computing is a climb. Each big step forward is also a step up, so that communication is further away from the machine, more on human terms.<\/p>\n
And each time, the number of people who can use computing increases dramatically. At first, programming languages were the medium of communication between man and machine. Fortran, the breakthrough computer language, was designed to resemble the algebraic formulas familiar to scientists and engineers \u2014 reasonably enough, since they were the only people anyone could imagine using the relative handful of giant calculating machines back then.<\/p>\n
Today, billions of people roam the Internet from computer phones they hold in their hands. Dramatic advances in hardware, of course, are a big part of the explanation, notably the flywheel of technological dynamism known as Moore\u2019s Law, celebrating the chip industry\u2019s ability to double computing power every couple of years (there\u2019s a debate about whether the pace is tailing off, but that\u2019s another story).<\/p>\n
Yet there is another force in the striking democratization of computing beyond hardware, one that is more subtle but still crucial. That is the steady stream of improvements in the design of computer products, mainly software, which have opened the door to new users by making computers easier to use. The term most used now is \u201cuser-interface design.\u201d But that suggests a narrower, product focus than the field that stretches back several decades, called human-computer interaction, which embraces psychology, anthropology and other disciplines.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think human-computer interaction designs have had as much impact as Moore\u2019s Law in bringing the web and mobile devices to the world,\u201d said Ben Shneiderman, a professor at the University of Maryland, College Park.<\/p>\n