HCI is not just about interaction design. Although artifacts are always designed, which particular artifacts actually become adopted is not a direct function of the artfulness or skill in their design. Many well designed artefacts fail. This reflects the fact that while the form and functionality of informational artifacts are designed, how they come to be used is generally not. We cannot predict with any certainty which designs will succeed, especially when we are creating a new class of artifact (and when we are, we don't know that we are!). Historical examples from printing, through to the telephone, and on to the world wide web and mobile phones strengthen this view, and support an alternative perspective based on an analogous process to that of natural selection through evolution.
We know from evolutionary biology that the emergence of a new species cannot be predicted. This perspective on artifact evolution brings out the limits of the "intelligent design" of informational devices, which assumes that the target we are designing to reach is fixed - it isn't. Like the watchmaker of evolutionary design, the interaction designer is, at least to some extent, blind. This helps us understand why new trends in the application and use of newly designed technologies often take us - and their designers - by surprise. And yet we can make sense of such developments from the perspective of human experience; both in its plasticity and in its enduring characteristics.
While the value of good,
intentional design of information artifacts should be acknowledged, it is
only a relatively small part of a larger process of co-evolution of technology
and human experience. For this reason, I'm unhappy that terms like Interaction
Design are taken to encompass our field of study. And while this process of
technological evolution is to a large extent blind, it can itself be supported
at the level of specific artifact designs by technological tools which mimick
the processes of biological evolution and which may or may not be guided by
a human designer. But the future of our technologically-mediated minds is,
in the same sense as the appearance of new biological species, not predictable.
Futurologists are always wrong; we don't invent the future, it happens to
and with us.