Waves of HCI

This is perhaps one of the important things that we need to know as an Interaction designer. The waves of Human Computer Interaction.
This is a precis and some of my understanding from the paper "When second wave HCI meets third wave challenges" by Susanne Bødker .
Roughly classified as the 1980s-first wave, 1990s-second wave and the 2000s-third wave and possibly a 4th wave in the 2010s.

So the first wave HCI dealt a lot with rigid guidelines, the testing of the guidelines against the products. There was a strong focus on the user and the user dimensions. Thus the fields like Human Factors and Ergonomics were the guiding forces. There was a notion of uniting everything on the desktop. The notion that the desktop is where all the work takes place and that everything on the desktop needs to be for the person using it. The machine centered notion was in place and almost everything was defined in this context. Things like usability testing and experimental psychology came into the picture where the emphasis was on the ways in which the users were able to complete tasks and what were the cognitive aspects behind performing each task.

The second wave turned out to be more context specific. The context played a huge role in the design of things. This was where the focus shifted from the desktop to the workspace. The office and the places around where the people did all the interactions with the computers. The focus also started to shift towards computers that were not a part of the desktop interactions.
The focus was now on "Humans" rather than "Users". The stringent boundaries between the workspace and the non-workspace started being discussed in circles and also emphasis on trying to design for the workspace. These boundaries were later to be broken in the third wave.
Here we also see the emergence of the design-as-a-science paradigm. The focus here was on methods too but it was too much rationality oriented. There was a seeking for a proper rationality behind everything that was done. Participatory Design became famous owing to its involving the users in the design process so that the contexts could be well defined.

In the third wave, the current wave, there are a lot of challenges. One of the most important of those is the role of the user, the humans or better to call the Actors. The roles that the humans now play in the design process is more than what it used to be ever. There is an emergence of the design-as-an-art initiative. But on the downside of it, many fear that this may well lead to design becoming too art oriented. Or as is mentioned in the paper, artsy-fartsy.
The focus in the third wave seems to revolve around cultures and ethnography. There is a non-rationale approach to design being adopted at times. The domain of looking is now expanded to a wider area that now covers homes, leisure places, homes. The whole aspect of tying emotions to design is really hot and forms a major chunk of the research.
interaction design is now no more seen for a single mediator (like the desktop as seen in the 1st wave) but as from multiple mediators. This I believe has a lot to do with the expansion of computers to a wider range of applications. The context is not so well defined in this wave, because it is not sure in what form the user will be interacting with the interface.
As a designer, it now becomes imperative to focus on the "lifeworld" and the gamut of our design space is large. Now everything around us revolves around design.

A possibly 4th wave could be coming where the user has completely different says in the whole design space. The whole aspect of the users defining the content like the Facebook, the Flickr, etc could form a major part of what would be termed as the 4th wave.

In the end as a designer, we should all remember and constantly try to answer the question, how is my design going to change people's lives. Is it going to be better? Or worse? Ultimately, we should ask ourselves... will the design bring about a smile to the people who will use it.