Introduction to Man‐Computer Communication

Interactive computing and the use of interactive systems will grow considerably in the near future. One of the reasons is the increasing interest in what is called “office computing”. Yet the number of computer scientists doing research in interactive systems is relatively small. This shows on the one hand in the modest number of papers on the subject in the official journals, on the other hand in the ill-defined classification of this area in the recently adopted Computer Review Classification [I]. Perhaps we could say that this speciality is still in its pre-paradigmatic period: the field seems overwhelmingly large and vaguely defined, and shows overlap with various other disciplines, such as psychology, artificial intelligence (AI), linguistics, sociology, and industrial design. The field clearly possesses scientific traits, but is at the same time subject to folk wisdom (recently re-baptised to folk theorems).