Plenaries

Tony joined IBM in the United Kingdom as a Systems Engineer in the Banking Branch, helping major UK financial establishments develop IT solutions. With a growing involvement in development, he moved to IBM's Services organization, producing numerous application packages.

With the advent of End User computing, Tony helped to launch IBM's international Time Sharing service in Europe. Here he led the development of numerous application products for business professionals. Responsibility was then taken for the UK time Sharing service, as well as the development of associated software.

It soon became apparent that IBM customers were looking to use a combination of our packages, but with strong integration. This led to the rapid development of the first true suite of business tools for Management Information and Decision Support. This offering, named Application System (AS), became IBM's most successful application offering, both as a service and subsequently as a Program Product.

This success with AS led to the establishment of the IBM Software Development Laboratory, in Warwick, UK, where Tony served as Director. Soon after he also took responsibility for IBM's Dublin Laboratory.

During the late 1980's, Tony led the design of IBM's future end user systems, including the definition of User Interface Standards. Most of this design and architecture has been adopted by the computer industry and is heavily reflected in the Graphical User Interface of todays' Personal Computer systems.

Tony is the recipient of many IBM awards for innovation and technical achievement. He became a member of the IBM Academy of Technology in 1989 and was appointed an IBM Fellow in 1993. Now as Vice President of Ease of Use, he is influencing the next revolution in End User computing.

eCommerce is transforming every aspect of business, sending companies scrambling to cope with the new market realities of doing business online. By 2010, one-third of the world's $60 trillion economy will be conducted online. The U.S. Department of Commerce projects that by 2006, half of U.S. workers will be information technology workers or in a field that uses information technology heavily.

The shift to a digital economy will have severe implications for companies that cannot adapt. In the United States, half of the current Fortune 2000 will not survive the decade. With a third of the economy online, issues of how people interact with the technology become mission critical to corporate survival. HCI is legitimized not because the masses are experiencing computers for the first time, but because it has a direct and quantifiable impact on profits. New corporate titles such as "Director of Making Stuff Easy" and "VP of Ease of Use" demonstrate that HCI issues finally matter to senior management. Topics that were the exclusive domain of marketers such as branding, customer service, store shopping behavior, consumer loyalty, pricing strategies, privacy, and trust now require an understanding of human-computer interaction to maximize the quality of the customer experience.The plenary will explore these How will consumers react to an electronic storefront? opportunities and challenges facing the HCI e-commerce community.

Jerry Lohse is the Research Director of the Wharton Forum on Electronic Commerce. He is an international expert on consumer behavior in electronic commerce environments. He has published over 30 articles in leading national and international journals and his comments have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, National Public Radio, the Nightly Business Report and others.

Networked computers are becoming ubiquitous and are playing increasingly significant roles in our lives and in the basic infrastructures of science, business, and social interaction. For human-computer interaction to advance we need to better understand the emerging dynamic of interaction in which the focus task is no longer confined to the desktop but reaches into a complex networked world of information-based tasks and computer-mediated interactions.

While the web and electronic commerce appear to be precipitating a paradigm shift in how we need to think about designing information-based work materials and computer-mediated interactions, it is also increasingly clear that the associated climate of speed and short-range focus may well be restricting the development of the science necessary for user-centered system design to flourish. In this talk, I argue that our field must confront serious theoretical, methodological, and scale issues if it is to continue to advance human-centered design.

Jim Hollan is Professor of Cognitive Science at the University of California, San Diego. Prior to his recent return to UCSD, he was Chair of The Computer Science Department at the University of New Mexico, led the Computer Graphics and Interactive Media Research Group at Bellcore, and was Director of the Human Interface Laboratory at MCC. In collaboration with Professors Edwin Hutchins and David Kirsh he directs the Distributed Cognition and Human Computer Interaction Laboratory. His research is concerned with Understanding the representational possibilities of computationally-based media and how interactive dynamic representations can change the cognitive structuring of tasks and mediate their performance. His current work focuses on annotation, image-based information navigation, and multiscale visualization.

Over the past 50 years our conception of machines has expanded from the instrumentality assigned them in craft and industrial contexts to a view of machines as communicating others. Most recently, the growth of the World Wide Web and associated initiatives in e-commerce have brought a renaissance of the idea of personified computer artifacts attributed with a capacity for intelligent, interactive behaviour. The dominant form of this project is interface agents that will serve as a kind of personal assistant to their human users. This paper explores these latest configurations of interactivity at the interface, not by arguing the question of agency from first principles but by asking how the effect of machines-as-agents is generated. I conclude with some reflections on the relation between agency at the interface and ease of use, including thoughts on what each means for the aim of useable and useful design.

Lucy Suchman received a Ph.D. in Social/Cultural Anthropology from the University of California at Berkeley in 1984.From 1979 she was a researcher at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, most recently as a Principal Scientist and founder of the Work Practice and Technology research area. In August of 2000 she will leave Xerox PARC to join the faculty of Lancaster University as a Professor of Sociology. Her research concerns the relation of everyday working practices to computer systems design. Her book" Plans and Situated Actions: the problem of human-machine communication" was published by Cambridge University Press in 1987.Lucy was programme chair of the Second Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work, CSCW '88, and has been an active member of the CSCW, participatory design and HCI research communities.

Gillian Crampton Smith will speak about the role of designers in the development and production of interactive products, systems and experiences.

Gillian Crampton Smith trained as a philosopher and art historian but decided to follow her long-standing interest in typography. She worked in books and magazine design, spending four years on the London Sunday Times before going freelance. In 1981, an issue of the US type magazine Upper & Lower Case about computers in graphic design inspired her to buy a computer and to write a program to do magazine layouts on the screen-early DTP. Her experience writing a page layout tool for designers convinced her of the important contribution designers could have in the design of the human-computer interface and she had expected-prematurely as it turned out-that by the mid eighties this would be an important field of work for designers. She joined the Royal College of Art in 1989 where she started the Computer Related Design Programme, a multidisciplinary Masters Course in interaction design. The programme spans the disciplines of graphic design, film and animation, industrial design, electronic and software engineering. By research through design it is developing the role of the art and design disciplines in shaping the way people interact with electronic tools, products and media. Its research collaborators include Interval Research Corporation, Appliance Design Studio, Philips Research, Helsinki Telephone Corporation, Infogrames and Intel.

Professor Crampton Smith will speak about the role of designers in the development and production of interactive products, systems and experiences and show the experimental work her department is doing-experiments in the way new technologies might take their place in people's everyday life and culture.

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