Human-centred’ computing: a new perspective?

Prologue I first met Niels Bjørn-Andersen when we were both on the International Programme Committee for an EU Conference on the Information Society chaired by Enid Mumford (Bjørn-Andersen et al., 1982). In 1985, I met him again, this time in California at one of the early human–computer interaction conferences (ACM CHI), and then I spent a period at the Copenhagen Business School with his group that summer, before my travels in Asia. On my return, I again spent a month with Niels Bjørn-Andersen at the CBS in January 1988, where we produced a paper for one of the earliest workshops on CSCW in Europe (Bannon et al., 1988). I had heard Niels Bjørn-Andersen give a talk with the provocative title: ‘Are human factors “human”?’ (subsequently published as Bjørn-Andersen, 1985) that resonated with my experiences in the human factors field. My work since that time has increasingly come to question the adequacy of our understanding of the human aspect of computing, and the following continues this concern.