Seven HCI Grand Challenges

This article aims to investigate the Grand Challenges which arise in the current and emerging landscape of rapid technological evolution towards more intelligent interactive technologies, coupled with increased and widened societal needs, as well as individual and collective expectations that HCI, as a discipline, is called upon to address. A perspective oriented to humane and social values is adopted, formulating the challenges in terms of the impact of emerging intelligent interactive technologies on human life both at the individual and societal levels. Seven Grand Challenges are identified and presented in this article: Human-Technology Symbiosis; Human-Environment Interactions; Ethics, Privacy and Security; Well-being, Health and Eudaimonia; Accessibility and Universal Access; Learning and Creativity; and Social Organization and Democracy. Although not exhaustive, they summarize the views and research priorities of an international interdisciplinary group of experts, reflecting different scientific perspectives, methodological approaches and application domains. Each identified Grand Challenge is analyzed in terms of: concept and problem definition; main research issues involved and state of the art; and associated emerging requirements

Designing hypermedia: A collaborative activity

While approaches exist for designing hypermedia applications with respect to content, structure, and presentation [2], little attention has been paid to the actual process that individual designers incur (see Nanard and Nanard in this issue) or that groups undergo in collaborative design. Large and complex applications usually require a team of content providers, structure and value adding editors, scenario and script writers, graphic, layout and interface designers, among others. Here, we focus on two aspects of collaboration in a hypermedia design team: support for authors deciding jointly on content, structure and presentation; and group meeting support. The collaborative support we provide derives from investigating the cognitive and social aspects of both distributed cooperative authoring of complex hyperdocuments [4] and the face-to-face staff meetings of a hypermedia newspaper’s editorial team [3]. In the case of cooperative authoring, we distinguish three modes of collaboration: individual, loosely coupled and tightly coupled work, with corresponding modes i