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There are two senses of "inevitable" when used with technology. In the first case, an invention merely has to exist once. In that sense, every technology is inevitable because sooner or later some mad tinkerer will cobble together almost anything that can be cobbled together. Jetpacks, underwater homes, glow-in-the-dark cats, forgetting pills — in the goodness of time every invention will inevitably be conjured up as a prototype or demo. And since simultaneous invention is the rule not the exception, any invention that can be invented will be invented more than once. But few will be widely adopted. Most won't work very well. Or more commonly they will work but be unwanted. So in this trivial sense, all technology is inevitable. Rewind the tape of time and it will be re-invented. The second more substantial sense of "inevitable" demands a level of common acceptance and viability. A technology's use must come to dominate the technium or at least its corner of the technosphere. But more than ubiquity, the inevitable must contain a large-scale momentum, and proceed on its own determination beyond the free choices of several billion humans. It can't be diverted by mere social whims.

The challenge of personal computing became manifest at an opportune time. The broad project of cognitive science, which incorporated cognitive psychology, artificial intelligence, linguistics, cognitive anthropology, and the philosophy of mind, had formed at the end of the 1970s. Part of the programme of cognitive science was to articulate systematic and scientifically-informed applications to be known as "cognitive engineering". Thus, at just the point when personal computing presented the practical need for HCI, cognitive science presented people, concepts, skills, and a vision for addressing such needs. HCI was one of the first examples of cognitive engineering. Other historically fortuitous developments contributed to establishment of HCI. Software engineering, mired in unmanageable software complexity in the 1970s, was starting to focus on nonfunctional requirements, including usability and maintainability, and on non-linear software development processes that relied heavily on testing. Computer graphics and information retrieval had emerged in the 1970s, and rapidly came to recognize that interactive systems were the key to progressing beyond early achievements. All these threads of development in computer science pointed to the same conclusion: The way forward for computing entailed understanding and better empowering users.

One of the most significant achievements of HCI is its evolving model of the integration of science and practice. Initially this model was articulated as a reciprocal relation between cognitive science and cognitive engineering. Later, it ambitiously incorporated a diverse science foundation, notably Activity Theory, distributed cognition, and ethnomethodology, and a culturally embedded conception of human activity, including the activities of design and technology development. Currently, the model is incorporating design practices and research across a broad spectrum. In these developments, HCI provides a blueprint for a mutual relation between science and practice that is unprecedented.

In the latter 1980s and early 1990s, HCI assimilated ideas from Activity Theory, distributed cognition, and ethnomethodology. This comprised a fundamental epistemological realignment. For example, the representational theory of mind, a cornerstone of cognitive science, is no longer axiomatic for HCI science. Information processing psychology and laboratory user studies, once the kernel of HCI research, became important, but niche areas. The most canonical theory-base in HCI now is socio-cultural, Activity Theory. Field studies became typical, and eventually dominant as an empirical paradigm. Collaborative interactions, that is, groups of people working together through and around computer systems (in contrast to the early 1980s user-at-PC situation) have become the default unit of analysis. It is remarkable that such fundamental realignments were so easily assimilated by the HCI community.