SOFT VERSUS HARD: The Essential Tension

Over the past thirty years, human-computer interaction (HCI) has developed as a strongly theoretical area of interdisciplinary scientific research and technology development. In the mid-1980s, there was a debate in the pages of the journal Human-Computer Interaction regarding the nature of science in HCI. Allen Newell and Stuart Card described a “hard science” paradigm for HCI, which they argued would more effectively integrate psychology and computer science as interdisciplinary foundations. Robert Campbell and I questioned this conclusion. Like most significant debates, this discussion is ongoing. This paper summarizes the original debate, and places it in the context of HCI, as this field developed through the ensuing twenty years, and, more generally, in the context of multidisciplinary research visions, which inevitably must wrestle with the tensions between “soft” and “hard” science.