Lecture on the occasion of the conferment of honorary doctorate by
the Faculty of Engineering Technology of Hasselt University
Human-Computer Interaction:
An Engineering Perspective Through Time
Prof. Dr. Joëlle Coutaz
Tuesday May 28th, 2024
Lecture organized on the occasion of Prof. Dr. Joëlle Coutaz’s honorary doctorate at Hasselt University, in recognition of her pioneering work in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), a field with a major impact on how we interact with computer systems today, the new master in Software Systems Engineering Technology and the HCI research at EDM.
As one of the pioneers of HCI, Joëlle Coutaz can offer a unique perspective. She first used a computer mouse at Carnegie Mellon University in 1982. At the time, personal workstations with graphical user interfaces did not yet exist in France. She used her own money to buy a Macintosh—with no disk drive and 128 kB of main memory—and attend CHI. This inspired her to change her academic orientation to HCI, not knowing HCI would become a mainstream research area.
She invented the PAC software architecture model, which influenced the modern MVC software design pattern that is omnipresent in software today. She subsequently added support for multimodal interaction, long before this would become popular on devices such as smartphones.
With the move to ubiquitous computing, she defined the concept of user interface plasticity—the capacity of user interfaces to adapt to the context of use while preserving usability—and her unifying reference framework served as a structure for user interface description languages.
She also sought to empower people to configure and program smart home services, such as lighting as eco-feedback. Since then, her interest has focused on digital behavior change intervention, with experiments on energy consumption in office buildings and domestic spaces.
