In this section I have placed a summary of an article by Baecker and Buxton called A Historical and Intellectual Perspective (Preece & Keller, 1990) that lays the ground for the rest of the contents by taking a look at the origins of the discipline.
This section features a summary of an article called Four Different Perspectives on Human-Computer Interaction by Kammersgaard (Preece & Keller, 1990).
This section features a brief look at a well known article about the ground breaking work at Xerox PARC in the late seventies called Designing the Star User Interface by Smith et al. (1990). Then comes a short summary of an article by Shackel called Human Factors and Usability (1990), that presents a synthesis of different approaches to design for usability. As a progression from those ideas I then take a look the article From Human Factors to Human Actors (Bannon, 1991).
As a sort of extra feature I have also taken a look at a connection between HCI and artificial intelligence (AI), since that was a prerequisite for this course, by giving an account for an article called Theory-Based Design for Easily Learned Interfaces (Polson & Lewis, 1990).
This part includes an extensive summary of Lucy Suchman's dissertation called Plans and situated actions: The problem of human-machine communication (1987), which is a critique of a help system for a photocopier based on the assumption that help systems can understand the user's needs by trying to infer the user's plan based on some parameters describing the state of the system. The critisism is also directed generally towards AI's view of how the human mind works, and the decompositional work analysis approach of task analysis. The book is the most famous example of ethnography in HCI.
Several attempts have been made to make the HCI resource inventory on WWW. Instead of trying to re-invent the wheel yet again, I have collected a few links to some of these existing resources. Even this small selction is partly redundant since they make cross-references to eachother (but this could be said about any list of WWW links since everything is linked to everything in some way or another 8-).
