Human–computer interaction (HCI) is the discipline I completed my PhD in.

On Reddit, a user in r/hci asked “How can I self learn HCI?”

/u/Goretx gives a great response:

Interaction Design: Beyond Human-Computer Interaction by Yvonne Rogers, Helen Sharp, Jennifer Preece is a very good start to learn about current design-oriented HCI. It covers some basic principles, concept and processes. I know, the title is “interaction design” and it promises to go “beyond” HCI; I suggest to read Jonas Löwgren’s review to understand why that is not the case.

HCI Theory: Classical, Modern, and Contemporary by Yvonne Rogers is a good way to understand the breath of HCI research, and a bit of history.

Same goes for HCI Models, Theories and Frameworks by John M. Carroll.

Humanistic HCI by Jeffrey Bardzell and Shaowen Bardzell, is also a good start, this time more focused on HCI influenced by humanities.

HCI evolution has famously been described in terms of Paradigms and Waves.

In their oft-cited article, Steve Harrison, Phoebe Sengers, Deborah Tatar, present the idea of paradigms in HCI and describe the emergence of a third paradigm related to phenomenology, embodied interaction, etc. and distancing itself from the previous one related to cognitive science. The first paradigm is instead connected to human factors and engineering.
They highlight the importance of being explicit about the paradigm used to justify methodology and methods and avoid conflicts of legitimacy of contribution, something they explore more in depth in a following article.

At the same time (they wrote their work in the same time period), Susanne Bødker described HCI in 3 waves. Bødker’s waves are similar but not exactly matching Harrison et al.

  • The first wave was based on human factors and cognitive psychology
  • The second went “from human factors to human actors”. It has focused on the work environment and communities of practice, work groups that use collections of applications. Theory here is often based on Situated Action (Lucy Suchman), distributed cognition (Hutchins) and activity theory, and concepts such as Context become extremely important.
  • In the third wave, technology propagates beyond work environments, reaching every aspect of life. New concepts such as culture, emotion and experience, and meaning-making are attended to, and the context is greatly expanded. The third wave also defined itself in negation of the second: non-work, non-purposeful, non-rational. User Experience as a thing emerged from this (to then pivot back to usability and effectivity again, as it is practiced today).

I would further recommend the textbook Ways of Knowing in HCI.