Card, Stuart

Card at CHI 2003 — Stuart Card (center), Jock Mackinlay, and Ben Shneiderman pose with their book at the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems in Fort Lauderdale, FL, April 5-10, 2003.

Stuart Card has made a wide range of contributions to the field of human-computer interaction, but his breakthroughs have stemmed from the conjunction of his background in psychology and his career in computing technologies.

Card and Peter Pirolli’s collaborative work on information foraging is seminal in the field of HCI, because it is describes how humans search for, take in, and subsequently adapt or abandon strategies for seeking information based on their successes or failures. This work not only informs the spectrum of hardware and software development, but is also widely discussed in the Information Sciences.

Stuart Card (left), Peter Pirolli, and Jenny Preece at the 2011 ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems in Vancouver

Like Bill Buxton, Card also worked on the application of Fitts’ Law to computer input devices, focusing on the mouse. In addition, he co-authored The Psychology of Human-Computer Interaction with Allen Newell and Thomas P. Moran. The book lays out the GOMS model, an elementary model upon which dozens of industry-specific models have been based. His second book, Readings in Information Visualization: Using Vision to Think, co-authored with Jock D. Mackinlay and Ben Shneiderman, collects and explains the original research in the field of information visualization and its universal applicability.

“Stu Card’s capacity to fuse big ideas in psychology and computing have produced a steady flow of important books and papers. I had the pleasure to work with Stu and Jock Mackinlay on our 1999 book ‘Readings in Information Visualization,’ for which Stu supplied to potent subtitle ‘Using Vision to Think.’ Working together was great fun as we blended our ideas to achieve ‘taxonomy harmony’ and a balanced set of references to PARC’s and HCIL’s work. Stu could also be generous, as when he saw me after reading my 1982 direct manipulation paper – he pointed at me and said, ‘You got it!’ His confirmation was worth a lot to me. I hope I’ve been as generous to him, because his work so often gets it right.” – Ben Shneiderman

Stuart Card (right) and Dan Olsen addressing the assembly at the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems in the Hague, the Netherlands, April 1-6, 2000.