Section 19.1. Introduction

19.1. Introduction

HCI is a large research field in its own right. HCI's roots were in human factors and the design and evaluation of "man-machine" interfaces for airplanes and other complex and potentially dangerous mechanical systems. The first papers in what would later be known as HCI were published in the 1970s and concerned the design of user interfaces in time-sharing systems. The field took off with the advent of personal computers and the single-user interface in the early 1980s. HCI's roots then were in cognitive-oriented, single-user interfacesthe so-called user interface.

HCI has since expanded to consider a variety of subareasdesign methodologies, usability and usability testing, intelligent interfaces, adaptive interfaces, and so on. Of particular interest in this chapter is Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), sometimes known as groupware. CSCW is interested in how groups of people work or interact together using computational technologies. Indeed, HCI has grown in general to consider the effects of organizational, institutional, and even societal factors on how computer systems are put together and how users interact with systems.^[1] These topics have become increasingly important as the Internet has expanded the definition of "users" to potentially include billions of people in all of the world's countries and most of its cultures.

^[1] Jonathan Grudin, "The Organizational Contexts of Development and Use," ACM Computing Surveys 28:1 (1996), 169171.

This chapter largely views HCI in its broader context. HCI is not just about user interfaces but also about the user experience of systems: how people perceive and understand, reason and learn about, and react and adapt to digital technologies. To borrow the terminology Sasse and Flechais use in discussing security,^[2] HCI has come to deal not only with process (how systems are used, designed, and developed) and product (the systems themselves and their interfaces), but also with panorama (cultural and organizational contexts that support, discourage, or otherwise shape the systems they envelop). Privacy, like security, implicates all of these levels. It is, by its nature, concerned with the user and his data and also with the user and others' use of that data. Our interests, therefore, are those of HCI-writ-large.

^[2] See Chapter 2, this volume.

As HCI has gone through several generations of computational technologies, it has carried a number of research themes forward. This chapter considers the various HCI themes and their research findings that may be important when designing, constructing, or evaluating privacy mechanisms. Before exploring these HCI research streams, however, we first need to articulate a working definition of privacy, and to compare and contrast privacy concerns with HCI concerns.