| Title: |
Towards a History of British HCI |
| Speaker: | Elisabetta Mori |
| Date: | Thursday 20th February 2025 |
| Time: | 14:30 |
| Location: |
25 Copthall Ave, London EC2R 7BP and |
About the seminar
The seminar will share with the public the speaker’s recent research on the History of Human-Computer Interaction in the UK, enhanced by a series of new oral history interviews with academics and practitioners in the field. The history of British HCI is rich: Brian Shackel’s article Ergonomics for a Computer, published as early as 1959, is considered one of the first articles in the history of HCI. From the 1970s onwards several British centres in the UK focused on HCI research and development such as the Man-Machine Interaction Group at the NPL and the HUSAT at the University of Loughborough, among many others. The BCS Specialist Group on Human-Computer Interaction was established in 1984, playing a role in the development of the field in the UK and in connecting with the international community. The British HCI conference was one of the main early international conferences that shaped the discipline, while the Alvey Programme, driven by industrial priorities, influenced and gave strength to HCI in the UK.
This research was supported by the Archives of IT and the History of Computing Collection, Swansea University, and by a grant from the Worshipful Company of Information Technologies.
About the speaker
Elisabetta Mori holds a MSc in Architecture, University of Florence and a PhD in History and Philosophy of Computing at Middlesex University, London. The focus of her academic research is the history of computing in Europe, with a special focus on the 1950s and 1960s. Her collaborations include the Archives of IT and the LEO Computers Society in the UK, Software Heritage in France, and the Museum of Computing Machinery of the University of Pisa, Italy.
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