Austin Henderson

Austin Henderson’s 45-year career in Human-Computer Inter- action includes user interface research and architecture at MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory, Bolt Beranek and Newman, Xerox Research (both PARC and EuroPARC), Apple Computer, and Pitney Bowes, as well as strategic industrial design with Fitch and his own Rivendel Consulting & Design. Austin has built both commercial and research applications in many domains including manufac- turing, programming languages, air traffic control, electronic mail (Hermes), user interface design tools (Trillium), workspace man- agement (Rooms, Buttons), distributed collaboration (MediaS- pace), and user-evolvable systems (Tailorable — “design contin- ued in use,” Pliant — “designing for the unanticipated” and “scal- able conversations”). These applications, and their development with users, have grounded his analytical work, which has included the nature of computation-based socio-technical systems, the interaction of people with the technology in those systems, and the practices and tools of their development. The primary goal of his work has been to better meet user needs, both by improving system development to better anticipate those needs, and by broadening system capability to enable users themselves to better respond to unanticipated needs when they arise in a rich and changing world.