Interview with Professor Ernest Edmonds

Ernest Edmonds was born in 1942 in London. He says his family was a normal working class family, living in the suburbs of London. He adds: “We had no great aspirations, but we were happy with that.” Ernest sat and passed his eleven-plus and went on to grammar school. He describes the experience, saying: “It was the thing that moved me on a little bit and introduced me to more academic things than I would otherwise have met, and maybe that was an important step to lift my horizons a little bit.”

He attended Mitcham Grammar School before going to Leicester University in 1961 to study mathematics with a subsidiary of philosophy.

 He adds: “The philosophy turned out to be very important to me. I was close to the lecturers in philosophy, we met a lot socially and I learnt a great deal from that. It so happened that the head of the department of mathematics was a logician, very expert in philosophy also.  All this came together in a good way for me.  I then went on to Nottingham University where I studied for a PhD in logic. My topic was the formalisation of infinite lattice logics.  It was a formal mathematical logical system that I developed. It solved particular problems in mathematical logic based on some inventions by Polish logicians between the wars.”

Alongside his love of mathematics and philosophy, Ernest was also adept at drawing, a skill he started at school by drawing cartoons of his teachers. He explains: “I was very surprised to find that my friends could recognise the teachers in my drawings and that inspired me a little bit. By the time I was 15 or so, I was enjoying art more than any other subject at school and when I went into the sixth form I asked to study mathematics and art because I found mathematics easy and quite interesting and I really wanted to study art.  The school’s headteacher said I couldn’t do that combination, insisting that if I was going to study mathematics I had to also study physics. I argued about this and in the end the headteacher said that if I did physics, they would give me free access to the art classes after school, which were normally paid for.” He continues: “I thought of going to art school but I wasn’t attracted to it because friends of mine who were already at art school didn’t report back very promising stories about what they were learning, so I decided I would study mathematics, which was pretty easy, and left me lots of time to paint paintings.”

Ernest studied logic of which he says: “Logic is the fundamental mathematical discipline that underpins computing.”

His first encounter with a computer was working as a research assistant in mathematics at Leicester Polytechnic which had a Honeywell 200, a mainframe computer. He says: “Neither I nor almost anybody else was allowed to go into the room where it was, it was isolated from us, but we could program it by using punch cards.  It was a very big computer of its day.  It had 8k of memory, not even a watch would have such little memory today.  I thought programming was interesting, so I taught myself how to do it. I then started programming this computer for intellectual engagement.”

At the end of his first year as a research assistant at Leicester Polytechnic, Ernest was offered a permanent role as a lecturer in computing. He says: “So all of a sudden, I became a lecturer in computing and two or three years later I became head of the computing department in Leicester Polytechnic.  It was very strange. I always say I became a computer scientist by accident.”

In 1969, Ernest worked alongside Martin Campbell-Kelly and Mark Lee and together they would go on to teach human computer interaction.  Ernest explains: “Mark, Martin and I shared an office and we were interested in things like computer graphics, which was very new in those days. We were interested in pushing the world forward, looking at what next would happen in computing.”

Ernest had met Stroud Cornock who worked in the art college and was also interested in new media and what it meant. He met Stroud while working in 1968 making a relief painting called ‘Nineteen’ and needed to use the college’s spray paint facilities, that Stroud ran, to achieve the finish he wanted. It was also while he was working on the piece, that Ernest realised that he could use a computer to solve one of the issues he had with the painting.

Ernest says of Stroud: “He was important because he had been working with Roy Ascott, previously, and was interested in new media and whatever it meant, and so when he learnt that I was also programming, he helped me with the spraying, but we also became friends and talked about all this.

“I realised that this use of a computer was really an important step forward in my art. He and I developed a paper which we read at a computer graphics conference in 1970 where we said the future of computers in art will be interaction. Mark Lee had just negotiated to obtain a computer graphics facility for Leicester Polytechnic which included a graph plotter, something that could draw lines. I used that to develop my first interactive artwork with Stroud in 1970. This whole process was something that I worked with those four people really: Martin, Mark and Stroud, to talk about the future. It seemed to me at the time, that what we now call computer-human interaction, was at the centre of this future. And not just in art.” However, if interaction was the future, we needed to understand the relationship between humans and computers much better than anyone did at that time.

Ernest points to a talk he gave at the British Computer Society in 1970 as another important aspect of the journey toward human computer interaction. He explains: “I said that the method for developing software for users who were creative, or inventive in various ways, could not be the standard, it needed to be ‘agile’ to use the modern term. This was in the days of the Waterfall Model of project management. I proposed agile computing, although I didn’t use the word agile, I used the word adaptive. I wrote a paper about that, which was very difficult to publish, because nobody thought it was the right thing to do.  I had one rejection letter which said, if you don’t know what you’re going to do before you start, you shouldn’t do it.  However, by 1974 I got it published and it was one of the first papers published on agile computing. This process, which is central to most HCI work today, came out of this work that we were doing.”

In 1974, as head of the computing department, Ernest arranged for human-computer interaction (then called man-machine interaction) should be a research focus at Leicester Polytechnic.

He says: “Years before I ever moved to Loughborough University, we were in touch with them because Brian Shackel was there running HUSAT, and we formed an alliance with those people.  HUSAT was concerned with the human factors side of it, we were concerned with the implications of those human factors for the technology, how should you design software, what should the software architectures be, and all those kind of questions.”

In the 1980s Ernest would go on to be a committee member of the Alvey project which Brian chaired. Ernest adds: “I like to think I’ve played an important part as a member of that committee, promoting the whole subject in the UK in quite a big way.”

The Alvy Programme had evolved our of the Roberts Committee which produced a report looking from an industrial view of where research in computing should go. One of its areas included man-machine interaction. Ernest adds: “The academics hadn’t noticed this area, but the industrialists did and they said this matters. I was already working very heavily in that area, so I was able to put my hand up and say, I’m doing this and the funding body gave me quite a lot of money to work in that area and then Alvey came, and it became a very big thing.”

Ernest goes on to explain the results of his research, saying: “The main outcome was the understanding that the design process, that the design process for software had to be centred on the potential user and that they had to be involved in the design process, that iterative design process.  Secondly, this implied that the structure of the software had to be different to how it had been in the past, because the software had to be designed in a way that enabled the iteration to take place, so that a long way through the design process you could change your mind about something without it costing too much to make that change in the software.”

Asked how this related to his artwork during the seventies, such as ‘Datapack’ and ‘Communications Game’, Ernest says: “What I was trying to do was to explore in my art what the implications were of this new technology, because what I realised in the early 1970s was that it wasn’t just computation, it was also communication that was really important.  The internet was just beginning when I was building the network art piece called ‘Communications Game’. We didn’t have networks or the internet and although ‘Communications Game’ is a networked artwork, I built it by designing logic circuits and building them with a soldering iron.  I didn’t have the software. … The whole idea was that people were interacting with one another through the artwork.  Now it’s all normal because that’s what we do all the time, but at that time it was a new idea.  The art was exploring the potential of these new developments in technology.”

In the early 1980s, there were several British HCI groups including the work of Christopher Evans at the National Physical Laboratory, the British Computer Society HCI group to which Ernest belonged, Loughborough University, and the work of Brian Shackel, University College London, York University, Strathclyde University in Scotland where Jim Alty was based. Ernest says of Chris Evans: “He was an important character who encouraged me in those early days.”

In 1982, Ernest obtained a million pound grant for research into HCI. He says: “It meant that I and Leicester Poly became very noticeable on the scene and everyone wanted to come and see what we were doing. We became involved with many people around the country at that time. There was a shift to not just do research on human-computer interaction, but work out what the subject actually was. The big problem wasn’t so much within that community, it was selling it to everybody else.  Computer science departments in universities at that time were not very sympathetic to this human-centred view and so most of us had to argue quite fiercely within our universities that what we were doing mattered.  Only later did it become acceptable to think that human-computer interaction was important and that students should be taught about it.”

From 1985 till 2002 Ernest was based at the LUTCHI Research Centre at Loughborough University.  He says of the time: “We did a great deal of research using the Alvey Programme and the European Union funding in all kinds of HCI work, often resulting in results that were interesting to industry, often in collaboration with industry.  We had a great team there, there were a lot of important people working on the research.” British Aerospace, Aérospatiale, Daimler, Lotus Cars, Dowty Rotol, HP, IBM, IC, were a few of the companies involved with the research projects.

 One such project, that Ernest recalls, was the FOCUS project which was concerned with developing standards across platforms providing design support systems for the early part of the design process of technological systems, such as aircraft, cars etc. Ernest says: “This arose because the aircraft industry itself was having difficulty dealing with moving data between different systems and understanding this early part of the design process.  Many people would have thought that solving the problems that FOCUS was trying to solve was just a question of designing standards for the transmission of data between one computer and another, but it turned out when we looked at it that the architecture of the software, for example, and understanding the processes that people worked were also very important.  It was a much more human-centred problem than people had thought.” Linda Candy, Ernest’s wife, also worked on the projects and led many of the studies of human behaviour during the design process.

Ernest continues: “We found that many people in the software industry would ask a senior manager, how does this work and what do your people do. The manager would say, they do this, that and the other.  But when Linda talked to the people who actually did the work, she found that they didn’t do what the managers thought they did, they did other informal things, like making phone calls to people. So, relying on the management view of the process that’s undertaken was very unreliable. It provided a theoretical model of what people do, but what we needed to find out was what people actually did on the ground.  For computing development it’s very important to think about what does the person who’s really doing the work do and how do they do it. … These things are really important to understand when you’re building interactive computing systems.”

In 2002, Ernest became Professor of Computation and Creative Media and also director of the Creativity and Cognition Studios at the University of Technology in Sydney.

During the 1970s up to the 90s, academics interested in creativity found it difficult to gain funding. Ernest says that he found another way of doing this by talking about conceptual design which allowed him to gain the funding he needed to achieve the results he wanted.

He goes on to describe how attitudes changed when New Labour came to power in the UK in the 1990s, after Labour minister Chris Smith promoted the phrase ‘creative industries’. Ernest says of the shift in attitudes: “His report said the creative industries are important, they make a lot of money, we need to worry about them.  All of a sudden it became okay to talk about creativity and so on.

 Ernest took the role of a research professor in Sydney, a role that he describes as “the best job, because they pay you to do what you want to do”, Ernest describes how he was asked what he would do. He says: “I was very straight, I told them I would work on research into computing for creativity and for the arts, with the thought that if they don’t like that they won’t offer me the job and that’s fine.  But they liked it and they offered me the job, so that’s what we did.” This was the beginning of the Creativity and Cognition Studios allowing people to work on music and interactive art in computing.  Ernest adds: “This became possible because the mood in the world, not just in the UK, had changed and talking about supporting creativity was okay.” The research was into the HCI of creativity support systems; tackling the problem of how can computers best be used to enhance human creativity.

Ernest co-authored ‘From Fingers to Digits’ with Margaret Boden. The book was part of his research in Sydney, although the concept started as early as 1976, at Leicester at a conference called Human and Robot Behaviour. Ernest says: “I brought together artists, including the famous interactive artist, Edward Ihnatowicz, and people from the AI department at Edinburgh University, and Margaret came. Maybe that was the first meeting that brought those two things together.” Over the interceding years,  Margaret and Ernest discussed the subject and wrote various papers before deciding to write the book. Ernest adds: “This book, which was really about the process of making art and being creative with computers, ranging from issue of the practice through to the philosophy of that practice, including interviews with artists who wrote code. It was a coming together of lots of things that had happened over the years.”

In 2017 Ernest was presented with lifetime achievement awards from SIGGRAPH and SIGCHI.  He says of the honours: “It was a shock and amazing; especially amazing that both should occur at all, but also that both should occur in the same year. It was wonderful. What I like to think of is that it was a recognition, not just of me, but of the multidisciplinary developments in our world. It reflected that I’ve worked across disciplines, that it’s respected to do that, and it’s respectable to work across disciplines. I think everyone should take pleasure in thinking that was a way of saying it’s okay, and you can be at the top level and you don’t have to just do one thing, because I think that it’s in the intersection between disciplines where all the excitement usually is.”

“I am proudest of the achievement across disciplines. I’m particularly proud of my developments in interactive art. I have done things in interactive art and distributed art that I think have pushed the boundaries forward, working on art that interacts over long periods of time and changes over long periods of time, art where the interaction is between people in remote places and so on.  I also think I’ve been quite instrumental in making creativity important in the computer-human interaction world:  Enhancing human creativity and moving the focus from productivity to creativity.”

Asked if he would do anything differently, Ernest says: “I’d probably do everything differently. I would have tried to find out a bit more about how the academic world worked. If I’d have started again I would have liked to have learnt more about how to be successful and influential, maybe I could have then been more successful, I’m quite happy about that, but I might have been more influential if I’d have learnt more of those tricks that those Eton boys seem to know.”

Ernest reflects on the importance of collaboration throughout his career, saying: “As well as my work with Linda Candy, which is critical, collaboration with other people, including my own students, has been central to my work. People don’t always understand that a PhD supervisor often gets as much out of the process as the PhD student does.  All people I’ve worked with have in one way or another contributed to my life, to my pleasure in life, never mind my career, just my enjoyment of everything.  And it’s interesting to notice that many of my PhD students are now good friends.”

About the future challenges and opportunities in HCI, Ernest says: “We still have the challenges of changing the attitude to design and development methods.  It seems strange to me, because I’ve been talking about it for 50 years, but nevertheless I still see many examples of poor design and development methods, not taking human beings properly into account.  I see large software corporations selling themselves to institutions and the institutions buying their solutions without properly considering the human factors involved and the match between the solutions being offered and the need that the users have. We still have a long way to go in terms of design and development methods taking human factors properly into account. That’s a big challenge.

“The future is much more distributed and connected and I think the field needs to do a lot more work, not only on what I’ve just alluded to, but also on distributed and connected interactions.

“Finally, underlying all of this, there is still more work to be done to increase the concern for human creativity.  Fundamentally important to us all is to enhance human creativity. There is a movement among people using what is currently called AI, although they don’t seem to know what AI means, to try to take over the creativity, from the human into the machine. We should be doing just the opposite, working out how to enhance the human creativity and enrich our lives. This is probably the biggest and most important task for the community to work on.”

“Have a mission of what really matters to you and every opportunity that arises, measure it against whether it helps you towards that mission or not.  Don’t go for something that is just more money or higher status. Consider what is it you really want in life, what you want to achieve or where you want to be in life, and then try to think of all the opportunities that arise, which are unknowable. Opportunities occur, turn up, and you need to measure them against your vision.”

Interviewed by Elisabetta Mori

Transcribed by Susan Nicholls

Abstracted by Lynda Feeley