Standards: Hail and Farewell

Pat Billingsley

This issue marks my last standards column for the SIGCHI Bulletin. After seven years of writing about standards every quarter, I've decided it's time for some new words and new perspectives. Starting in the next issue, these will be graciously provided by Harry Blanchard, the incoming Standards Chair. For those who don't know Harry, I'll introduce him below, but first I want to share a few thoughts.

I recently looked back at my first standards column, which appeared in the April 1989 issue of the Bulletin. In that issue, I introduced myself to the SIGCHI membership and stated my goals for the column:

"As I see it, my primary task is to inform SIGCHI members about any standards activities that may affect them as designers and users of interactive software. I also hope to stimulate discussion and debate about the direction of various standards efforts, and to provide a forum for others to express their opinions. I will consider the column a great success if it encourages more people with a genuine interest in end user concerns to participate in the standards-making process."

I have many people to thank for whatever degree of success I've had in achieving those goals. First, I want to thank all the SIGCHI Executive Committees members from 1989 to the present, who have assisted my efforts in many different ways. Their long-term support for standards reporting has ensured that SIGCHI members have continued access to timely information about standards activities.

Thanks also to Jon Meads of Usability Engineering Services, who served as Standards Chair before me. Jon set a wonderful precedent in his lively columns, and was very generous with his time and support when I first took on the job.

I also want to thank the three fine Bulletin editors I've had the pleasure to work with: Peter Orbeton, Bill Hefley, and Steven Pemberton. I greatly appreciate their patience and professionalism over the years.

Last but not least, I want to thank the many people who've contributed standards information to this column. These include Kenichi Akagi of US WEST Technologies, Bob Beaton of Virginia Tech, Dick Granda of IBM, Ken Holdaway of UIS Consulting, Paul Reed of AT&T Bell Laboratories, Cathy Snyder of Martin Marietta, Tom Stewart of System Concepts, and Jim Williams of Bellcore.

Some of these people have also been willing participants in the Special Interest Group session on standards held at the CHI conference each year. Others who've donated their time to this effort over the years include Nigel Bevan of the National Physical Laboratory (UK), Lin Brown of Sun Microsystems, Klaus Peter Fahnrich of the Fraunhofer Institute, Susan Harker of Loughborough University of Technology, John Karat of IBM, Steve Lewis of AT&T Bell Laboratories, Tom Rideout of Hewlett-Packard, and Paulien Strijland of Apple. My thanks to you all.

Introducing Harry Blanchard, Incoming SIGCHI Standards Chair

As of July 1996, Harry Blanchard will become SIGCHI's new Standards Chair and editor of this column. Harry has been a Member of the Technical Staff at AT&T Bell Laboratories since 1988, where he has worked on corporate screen-design standards and guidelines for the development of speech recognition applications. Most recently, he has been involved in voice messaging, speech recognition, and IVR applications for AT&T Consumer Communications Services.

Harry has been involved in formal standards activities since 1989. He is a member of the HFES HCI Standards Committee, which is currently developing the ANSI/HFES 200 standard, and of the US Technical Advisory Group to ISO Technical Committee 159, Subcommittee 4.

Please join me in wishing Harry the best of luck during his tenure as Standards Chair. And if you have any late-breaking standards news to share, please pass it along to Harry at:

AT&T Bell Laboratories
101 Crawford Corners Road, Room 1L-505
Holmdel, NJ 07733-3030, USA

+1-908-949-9745 (vox)
+1-908-949-8569 (fax)
heb@arch4.ho.att.com

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Vol.28 No.3, July 1996
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