The capacity to join humans and machines: brain-computer and neural interfaces, augmented and immersive interaction, and the human-performance technologies at the boundary of person and system.
The Capability Development Index tracks the events that move a capability — operational use, technical breakthroughs, procurement decisions and the industrial base behind them — and places each on the record with the date it happened.
Recent developments cover the current period. Historical developments are the inflection points that produced Human-Machine Interfaces as it stands today.
Work at Xerox PARC during the 1970s is identified as the origin of HCI as a research practice. It preceded by decades the later offshoot of HCI security (HCISec), a comparatively nascent field.
The phrase that would come to name the field was first recorded in 1975 by Carlisle. Naming the interaction, rather than the machine, framed the relationship between user and computer as an open-ended dialogue rather than tool use.
Various strategies setting out methods for designing human–computer interaction emerged after the field was conceived during the 1980s. This marked HCI's shift from observation of users to a discipline with prescriptive design methodology, situated across computer science, behavioural sciences, design and media studies.
The seminal 1983 book popularised the term human–computer interaction and grounded it in behavioural science. It established the analogy between human-to-human dialogue and human-to-computer interaction that became central to the field's theory.