The most prestigious award SIGCHI (Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction) gives ------ the CHI Lifetime Achievement Award was presented to Tom Moran in the year 2004.

Tom Moran was a founding director of the Palo Alto Research Center in Xerox Corporation. As we know, the Xerox Corp. is widely known for its contribution on print machines and the pioneering work on user interfaces. Especially their invention on mouse and graphical user interface (GUI) have later been popular. As one of the founders of PARC, Tom and his partners devoted their early years of work in the theoretical foundations of HCI and published a culminating paper ------ The Psychology of HCI, which eventually leads to a further effort on the raise of several famous models, includes the GOMS model which we will have an overview of it later this semester.

In fact, that was only part of his contribution during his dramatic life working on HCI. What’s more, the primitive formulation of Xerox Star, the first ‘desktop metaphor’ was based on his design. Based on my simple knowledge, ‘desktop metaphor’ is just like the 3D desktop shown on some web pages. Users can empty their recycle bin by solely putting his or her hand on the 3d icon and make a gesture of ‘upside down’. That might be a funny experience when users pile the icons altogether and push them everywhere afterwards, and that is what HCI actually does.

Tom’s additional research on a variety of realms of HCI also reached a culminate standard in the specific area, for instance, task-mapping and mental models, which involves Dynamic Resource Reservation as well as Psychology. Moreover, he contributed to the world paradigm for CSCW (Computer Supported Cooperative Work), which calls for both tele-communication and coordination.

I’ve looked up some of Tom Moran’s materials online about his career and feat. The most frequently mentioned point is his paper on Psychology and I guess it might be the main reason of his nominating and obtaining the final award. Indeed, as far as I am concerned, based on the information I got on the threshold class, human-being is playing and will play a most critical role in the development within the realm of study on HCI, just as and because of its literally meaning. As long as the subject is to pace forward, one thing must be taken into consideration is how human actions is able to transmit information to computers and how computers reflect to the commands. Taking as an illustration, when we are to make a Voice Recognition System, sometimes we wonder what mood is the speaker is in. Is he angry or appease, sad or delighted? Psychology helps us distinguish different human mental moods and we can obtain something from the voice wave either. Is the speaker shouting aloud, or silently wept?  A successful system on HCI can never neglect the human mental matters, which can most probably be the reason why Dr. Tom obtained his glory.

Another fundamental point I got from the material is that people are considering about interaction all the time, not only between human being and machine, but man to man, machine to machine as well. A reasonable evidence is from the study of the Computer Supported Cooperative Work. What should an HCI Machine System actually do? Simply making interactions between human and computer is leaving too much to be desired. It requires file share theories and co-work environment at the same time. It may enlighten us to some extent. If we are going to make an online medical cure system with HCI, we should consider all aspects linked to the problem. Whether doctors are able to cooperate distantly? How will a machine reflect to the signals added onto it?

I am fully confident that there will be one day that doctors operates on a screen in his or her own office, treating a patient thousands of miles away. When we cast our net forward, we are handling more and more burden as well as responsibilities. Dr. Tom’s feat may instruct us a lot,  in addition, encourage us to explore the bright future.