Such approaches to computing have resulted in increasingly user-friendly computers and for his outstanding contributions to the study of computer human interaction (CHI), the Association for Computing Machinery's CHI special interest group will present Carroll with the CHI Lifetime Achievement Award at their annual conference in Fort Lauderdale on April 10. The award recognizes "a lifetime of innovation and leadership including cumulative contributions to the field, influence on the work of others, and development of new research directions" (http://sigchi.org/documents/awards.html). Carroll is the fifth recipient of the award.
Carroll, who is professor of computer science, psychology, and education, and director of the Center for Human Computer Interaction at Virginia Tech, says he "fell into" the field of computer-human interaction (CHI). It was a fortuitous step for us all.
When Carroll graduated from Columbia in 1976 with a degree in psychology, his girl friend had a year to go before she graduated and he wanted to stay around. So he took a post doctoral position at the IBM Thomas Watson Research Center. He stayed 18 years.
"The term human-computer interaction didn't exist yet. It was the end of the mainframe era, although no one knew it."
Carroll's postdoc assignment was to study the problems of professional programmers and software designers .
"Coming from academic psychology, where the study of problem solving -- at that time -- focused on puzzles as models, the opportunity to study problem solving in this complex, open-ended domain was eye-opening and refreshing. We had to create new methods and discover research goals."
He adds that psychology has since raised its focus with respect to real-world problems.
But Carroll stayed with computers. "I happened to be at one of the top two or three places in the world. The Watson research group had a very good trajectory in the company; we were well used and successful."
As the Watson group grew from three to 30 people, Carroll was a pioneer in the transition from software design and programming based on technology constraints to software development based on user experiences and user activity. It was a paradigm change. Programming was transformed from "functional specification" -- listing functions and then writing code to achieve the functions -- to "scenario based design."
"In the mainframe world, full-time technicians were on hand to run the machines. You could train them – with some difficulty – to do whatever was required. In the personal computer world, computers are in our homes, our cars, as well as our work places. There are no full-time technicians to keep it all running. It has to make sense. It has to be transparent. An important representation became a narrative description of use. A use scenario could be created even before anything was built. It puts the emphasis on human interactions with technology," Carroll says.
"Scenario based design answered the questions we were asking about problem solving in the 1970s -- how programmers could solve personal computer problems."
Carroll remembers his scenario-based epiphany. "I was manager of a user-interface group (actually, founding manager of IBM's User Interface Institute). We were discussing design and I was playing devil's advocate. We were talking about scenarios -- how people use PCs -- and I said, 'What if scenarios were used as the functional specification ?' This technical person I was talking to was aghast. Her reaction, and my realization that scenarios were really scary to programmers, motivated me to be more aggressive."
Carroll published his first paper on scenario based design in 1989, "but a group in requirements engineering had developed a related scenario concept in 1980 and in strategic planning there had been scenario-based work going back to the Hudson Institute in 1949. But I wasn't aware of that other work initially . Now almost everyone in software and HCI design uses scenarios. But I think most people assume the idea has always been there, like the Sun. If a technical idea is reasonable, it loses its history."
Carroll developed the concepts of usability specification and user interface metaphor, and originated the minimalist model of information design. His work on scenario-based design has had impacts beyond HCI in design studies, requirements engineering, human factors, and home-oriented informatics.
The next strategy for making computers not only user friendly but into extensions of human creativity, was "participatory design."
"If you had told me in the 1970s that retirees and children should have direct input in software design, I would have laughed."
By the time Carroll left Watson and joined Virginia Tech's faculty in 1994, participatory design had reached the United States. " It came out of Scandinavia. I heard about it at an international conference at the end of the 1980s. When I came to Virginia Tech, I wanted to change my technical direction. The Blacksburg Electronic Village (BEV) was a major initiative to put the town that surrounded the university online. I decided to work on community computing and computing in the public schools. That would absolutely require participatory design," Carroll says.
"Many of the programs and software packages developed for teachers have pretty much been failures," he says. "My thought was, if teachers are directly involved, we might have more success."
By the early 1990s, most participatory design projects had been short term -- six months duration at most. Carroll undertook a long term study, working with five Montgomery County teachers for six years. "I was able to look at the way participatory design develops and the consequences. You have to worry about trust, respect, and bridging communities. Participation is not a simple matter of inviting people to participate. You can't have respect just because you want it," says Carroll.
With the teachers, the nature of the relationship changed profoundly through time. "At first, the teachers totally deferred to us. We were the people with the grant and the graduate students so they thought we must know what we are doing. I realized that was both too much and too little. It was good they respected us but bad that they didn't think they had much to give. We needed people willing to share their expertise -- but they didn't think they had any," says Carroll.
"I believe that many people who think they are doing participatory design are actually engaging in cosmetic tyranny."
A breakthrough came in Carroll's school project when he video taped a ninth grade classroom and organized a joint discussion of the tape. "It was clear to the teachers that they knew more than we did -- we didn't know what was going on in that classroom."
Carroll's participatory design work is ongoing through the Center for Human Computer Interaction, which he founded at Virginia Tech. He manages a research project on networking tools for collaborative learning activities supported by the National Science Foundation, the Office of Naval Research, and the Hitachi Foundation.
Carroll has written more than 250 technical papers, and 13 books, including Making use: Scenario-based design of human-computer interactions (MIT Press, 2000), Human-Computer Interaction in the New Millennium (Addison-Wesley, 2001), Usability engineering: Scenario-Based Development of Human-Computer Interaction (Morgan-Kaufmann, 2002, with M.B. Rosson), and HCI Models, theories, and frameworks: Toward a multidisciplinary science (Morgan-Kaufmann, 2003). He has presented more than 30 plenary or distinguished lectures, including keynote addresses at international HCI conferences in Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, Germany, Japan, and the United Kingdom, as well as at international conferences in interactive system design, user interface design, requirements engineering, and home-oriented informatics. He serves on nine editorial boards for journals and handbooks. In 1994, he won the Rigo Career Achievement Award from ACM SIGDOC for his work on the minimalist information design model. In 2002, he was elected to the ACM CHI Academy, a small group of pioneers whose technical work enabled key advances in personal computing.
Carroll earned bachelor's degrees in mathematics and in information sciences from Lehigh University of Bethlehem, Pa. in 1972, a master's degree in 1974 and Ph.D. in psychology in 1976 from Columbia University of New York, N Y.