Machinery for managers: secretaries, psychologists, and ‘human–computer interaction’, 1973–1983

This article characterizes early research in the field of ‘human–computer interaction’ (HCI) by analysing the first decade of ‘user psychology’ research at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). PARC's Applied Information-Processing Psychology Project (AIP) provided an initial theoretical foundation for HCI in the early 1980s. Like researchers in artificial intelligence (AI), researchers at AIP drew from information-processing psychology. However, AIP researchers argued that their focus on human behaviour distinguished their research from AI and other fields allied with computer science. Previous scholarship has shown that United States computer engineers became concerned with ‘users’ as they sought to commercialize military-funded developments in interactive computing. This paper argues that the decision made by upper management in computerizing workplaces to shift some text production work from clerical workers to middle managers during the 1970s and 1980s led AIP to perceive ambiguities around gender and technical skill. This shaped the initial theoretical foundations that the research group offered to HCI – especially the group's conception of the ‘user’. Computer designers went from presenting word-processing programs as clerical machines for women workers to presenting them as tools for masculine thinking. AIP's research diverged from industrial engineering and AI in response to this transformation.