Human-Technology Interaction Research and Design: VTT Roadmap

Human-Technology Interaction is a human-centred perspective to technological innovation and development that has great relevance to the economical success of technical products and services. The aim of HTI research is to enhance the implementation of information technologies in solutions that are more functional, usable and meaningful for people. This report defines the central issues of HTI research. It provides an overview of the history of HTI research and elaborates on the different traditions within it, and the state of the art at VTT is briefly sketched.
The societal and technical drivers of HTI were surveyed to enhance understanding of the factors that effect the developments in this field. The implementation of information technologies has vastly increased the availability of information and connections in people’s everyday and working activities. As a consequence, the complexity of the interactions has increased. People face difficulties with information overflow, the diversity of different devices, applications and equipment as well as with the continuous introduction of new applications and updates of existing ones. The creation of possibilities to embed technology in smart appliances and environments together with the development of multimodal interface technologies are expected to ease the use of the capacities of the information technology. However, the new ways of applying ICT have simultaneously deepened the demands on usability. Moreover, questions regarding safety and operability, security and personal privacy have gained new relevance. As consequence the implementation of technologies in use create major challenges and need for research and innovations.
Integrating the possibilities that the enabling technologies provide and the demands of the users creates a great number of research challenges. For better comprehension of the challenges we developed a systemic conception of HTI. This model makes explicit the role of enabling technologies for all three interconnected interaction aspects of HTI, “smart objects, services and environments”, “usage practices”, and “organisations and cultures”. Another aspect of HTI is the human-centred design methodology, which needs to be further developed. All together 25 hot topics were identified as challenges for research. Their interconnections are made explicit with the help of the systemic HTI concept. In the final part of this document recommendations are made for the direction of HTI research at VTT.