Transparency - looking back at three decades of research

Since the early days of HCI, transparency has been a conceptual focus  and a concern for design - is it possible to make the computer go away, be unnoticed to the human user? Should the computer be viewed as a conversation partner or disappear just like we do not need to know about car engines to drive a car? The mid-1980 brought alternatives like the tool-perspective or the media perspective, and in my 1991 book, "Through the Interface", I proposed the wider perspective of mediation as the key to understanding and designing interaction.

Mediation and transparency continued to be debated on the international scene. EU chose the "disappearing  computer" to frame their research program for pervasive computing, and the Palcom project started from challenging this perspective. The so-called third wave of HCI brought further challenges to the perspective by proposing that the computer should not go away, or disappear and the computing should be noticeable, rather than unnoticed.

In the UUID project we have worked with new design principles for mediation and ubiquitous instrumental interaction, and the talk with draw upon trajectories through the local and global history of HCI as well on the most recent research.