"20 years a-growing"
revisiting from human factors to human actors
pp. 181-188
in: Samuli Pekkola (ed), Reframing humans in information systems development, Berlin, Springer, 2011Abstract
Almost two decades ago, I published an article entitled "From Human Factors to Human Actors" (Bannon, 1991) in the book "Design at Work: Cooperative Design of Computer Systems" (Greenbaum and Kyng 1991). This short polemical essay on the need to re-formulate our goals in the fields of information systems design and human-computer interaction to take account of people's general motivation and abilities, as well as their work setting, seemed to strike a chord. The article was anthologized in the popular HCI collection "Readings in Human–Computer Interaction" (Baecker et al. 1995) and is still, somewhat to my surprise, cited today. (witness the reference in the Chapter by Hovorka and Germonprez, this Section).