~ CHI’92

May3-7, 1992

ANTHROPOMORPHISM:
FROM ELIZA TO TERMINATOR
Moderatoc

Abbe DonIN CONTEXT
3435 Clay Street #4
San Francisco, CA 94118
415-567-8130
abbe@ well. sf.ca.us

Panelists;

Susan Brennan, State University of New York at Stony Brook
Bre~da Laurel, Telepresence Research
Ben Shneiderrnan, University of Maryland

INTRODUCTION

anthropomorphismin the interface. Like any taboo,simply sweeping away the issue (assigning humancharacteristics to the computer) does not make it go away.
The examples above highlight some of the contexts inwhich scientists, designers and filmmakers have exploredthe implicationsof anthropomorphizing
the humanmachine interfaee. Some techniques, such as talking cars,
have dissipated in response to users’ distaste. Others, suchas the Guides approach, need further refinemen~ and stillothers, like the images floating through popular culture,
warrant examination as they help us define both ourfantasies and fears about our relationship to machines,“I feel depressed.”“WHY DO YOU FEEL DEPRESSED?”
Eliza, 1966

“Open the pod bay door, Hal.”“I CAN’T DO THAT DAVE”
2001 A Space Odyssey, 1968
“MAN OF THE YEAR”
Time Magazine,

1982“YOUR DOOR IS AJAR”
Chrysler Le Baron,

With command line interfaces and text only systems, theeffect of the anthropomorphism taboo translated as, “don’t
use the first person in error messages. ” As Ben
Shneiderman notes, a message that avoids pronouns
altogether such as “To begin the lesson, press return” ispreferable to “I will begin the lesson when you pressreturn” [7]. However, as the field has matured, we areworking with more sophisticated systems that involve
graphics, full-motion video, sound and speech, virtualenvironments, and telepresence, as we collaborate withdesigners
whocomefromtraditions
whereanthropomorphism is not only accepted, but encouraged.

1983“I WILL ERASE YOUR MESSAGES”
Machine, circa 1988

Phonemate Answering“YOUR FRIEND JILL GILBERT HAS PUBLISHED AN
ARTICLEABOUT
DEFORESTATION
IN THEAMAZON AND ITS EFFECTS ON RAINFALL IN THE
suBsAHARA”
Knowledge

Navigator,“HI,NAWMYCOMPANIONSAMPLER.”Apple Computer,

1988

IS BRENDA, AND I’LL BE YOURAS YOU USE THE AMERICANA

Guides 3.0, Apple Computer,

There are a variety of task domains in which representing
the system in the interface runs up against this wall ofresistance. The design of multimedia authoring tools andcontent may be the fastest growing domain as thesesystems move off of our desktops and into our livingrooms now that CD-I, CDTV, and other consumer devices
are actually on the shelves of department stores. With
video on the computer screen, the human figure often
plays a prominent role in the interface. Recently, there has
been a discernible increase in the gratuitous use of thehuman figure with poorly lipsynched talking heads orsystems that fool the user into thinking that the system isintelligent. However, there are also examples of effective
uses of human characteristics that take advantage of thesemiotic shortcuts provided by costume, gesture, facial

1990“HASTA LA VISTA, BABY”
Terminator

22, 1991

Within the human-computer interface design community,
there is a longstanding tradition against the use of67

May3-7, 1992

CHI’92Natural Language Project.
She is currently AssistantProfessor of Psychology at the State University of New
Her current research interests
York at Stony Brook.
includethe roleof mutual
knowledgein humancommunication,
lexicalchoice,mentalmodelsofconversational partners, and conversational repa”r.

expression or voice intonation to help explain why thesystem is behaving in a certain way.
Another task domain involves representing autonomous
behavior in an information retrieval system or moregeneral operating system. While the human figure is notalways necessary for representing agency as defined byAlan Kay [2] or Brenda Laurel [3], anthropomorphism canbe a useful tool for designers if its strengths andIn addition, a distinction
weaknesses are understood.
between delegation and agency is emerging. While the actof delegating may make the user feel more in control thana system that implicitly forms a model of the user, theissues of representation and communication remain. Whendelegating the task of filtering email, for example, towhom or to what are we delegating the task? What is thenature of this entity and how do we communicate with it?
What is the nature of the distinction between delegation
and agency and how does it affect representations in theinterface?

Those
whodebatethevalueorevilsofanthropomorphizing the interface are missing the point.
Certainly it’s irritating to interact with a system that’s
superficially anthropomorphizedor cute. And in anelectronic medium, where communication takes place overa channel much narrower than face-to-face, imitating ahuman being can be misleading. But that is not a goodreason to throw away all of speech and language as acommunication modality.
There are classes of things that are done better with speechand natural language than with direct manipulation. Thesethings include delegating complex or redundant actions anddoing anything that’s not in the here and now. When
Sutherland [8] presented the first direct manipulation
system, the idea was to enable people and computers “toconverse rapidly through the medium of line drawings”.
What makes direct manipulation work is NOT the fact thatit’s visually conducted, but it is conversational.
Aconversational interface, whether it is visually or verbally
conducted, results in a coherent sequence of behavior. And
when speech and language interfaces become moreconversational, they will take their place along with direct
manipulation in the interface.

The limits of direct manipulation and desktop metaphors
are most evident when we leave our desktops altogether
and enter the immersive world of virtual reality systems or
the portable world of “personal digital assistants” [4] ahighly anthropomorphic term now in vogue among Apple
Computer’s marketeers used to describe portable electronic
calendars, organizers and cellular communicators. Agency
on the part of the system will need to be adequately
represented while the conversational component of direct
manipulation is enhanced.

We should stop worrying about anthropormorphism andwork on making systems capable of behaving as coherent
interactivepartners.
Whether these partners are
anthropomorphized
or not, they should present theirlimitations frankly. People are used to dealing with many
categories of partners: friends, strangers, the hard ofhearing, disembodied voices on the telephone, readers whowill come along after they are gone, foreigners, children,and dogs. This flexibility
has been documented evenamong the very young; 5 year olds use more simple
language when talking to 3 year olds than they do talking
to adults (6). It is this fundamental adaptability of humanbeings to their partners
that makes the wholehumardcomputer enterprise possible in the first place.

Finally, it is difficult
to discuss anthropomorphism
without also re-examining the moral and philosophicalissues associated with the debate. At the philosophicallevel, we are constantly redefining what it means to be
human. As Sherry Turkle observes, “people have a stakein seeing themselves as different” [9] from machines. The
inability to distinguish between human and machine, thereal and the constructed, or to be unable to “pull the plug”
plagues many characters in science fiction. According toDonna Haraway, “Late twentieth-century machines havemade thoroughly ambiguous the difference between naturaland artificial,mind and body, self-developing
andexternally designed, and many other distinctions that used
to apply to organisms and machines. Our machines are
disturbingly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert”[1],
PANELISTS’
Susan

POSITION

BrendaLaurelBrenda Laurel
has worked in the personal
computerindustry since 1976 as a programmer,
software designer,marketeer,producer,
and researcher.
Her academic
background is in theatre, and she holds an M.FA. and aPh.D. in theatre from Ohio State University.
In 1990,
she joined Scott Fisher in founding Telepresence Research,a company to conduct research and development in virtualenvironments
and remote presencetechnology
andapplications.
Brenda has published extensively on such
subjects as virtual reality design, computer-based agents,
and interactive jiction.
She is editor of the book, The Art

STATEMENTS

BrennanSusan Brennan a psycholinguist,
received her Ph.D. inCognitive Psychology from Stanford University.
She alsoholds an M. S.V.S. from the MIT Media Lab, where she
workedon computer-generated
caricatureandteleconferencing
interfaces,
She has done research inhuman-computerinteraction
at Atari, Apple Computer,and Hewlett-Packard
Labs, including five years on HP’s68

~ CHI’92

May3-7, 1992

of Human-Computer1990] and author
Wesley, 1991].

Interface Design [Addison-Wesley,of Computers as Theatre [Addison-College Park. His technical interests include user inte~ace
design, human factors research in programming,
hypertext,
and computers in education. His 1987 book Designing theUser Interface: Strategies for Effective Human-Computer
Interaction (1987), Addison-Wesley Publishers, Reading,“Virtual reality” is a medium that brings the whole issueof what an interface is into high relief.
With moreconventional systems, interfaces are conceived as ways ofrepresenting preexisting computational functionality tohuman participants. In virtual reality, on the other hand,
the interface - that is, a multisensory medium that aims toestablish a sense of presence in a representational context is often a solution in search of a problem. The questions
that most VR designers wrestle with are What kinds ofactions might one perform in this medium, and to whatend? How can activity be paced? Without the familiar
accoutrements of desktops, windows, or command lines,
how can participants be constrained - that is, how does theworld reveal its potential to a person, and how can aperson be prevented from falling off the edge of the world?
In the same way that people and other animate beings
provide such constraints in “real life” situations throughobservation, interaction, and dialogue, agents are an
obvious and powerful source of such constraints in virtualworlds.

MA (464 pages), has recently been published in Japanese,translation by Nikkei-McGraw-Hill,in its second edition.

Every technology passes through an immature phase inwhich human and animal models are used as metaphors fordesign. Lewis Mumford describes the process in hischapter on “The obstacle of animism” in Technics andCivilization (1934): “the most ineffective kind of machineis the realistic mechanical imitation of a man or anotheranimal... for thousands of years animism has stood in theway of... development.”
The artificial intelligentsia have made the same mistake intheir misdirected pursuit of human-like robots, naturallanguage speech recognition to support interaction, andnow human-like agents that magically maintain a usermodel and cleverly anticipate user needs like a perfect
butler or secretary. I believe that these scenarios are
obstacles in the development of truly powerful and simple
tools that will empower users through direct manipulationof objects and actions.

In virtual environments, as in scientific visualization
systems with conventional graphical interfaces, the whole
point is to represent information, theories, processes, andideas in ways that are directly accessible to the senses.
‘he same theory applies to the representation of sources ofagency. The central premise of virtual environments is toreplace sensory input from the physical world withtechnologically mediated sensory information, without
disrupting the connections between sensation, perception,cognition, and emotion. The aim is to enable people torespond holistically to such environments. There is noplace in the theory of virtual environments
for adisembodied“system”
as a source of agency,
or collaboration;indeed,such
communication,
disembodiment forces its mirror image on the participant
and precludes the possibility of holistic response.

My sentiments are based on my reading of historicalprecedents and on empirical studies.
The talking
automobiles and cash registers are gone, the human-likebank teller machines seem like anachronisms, and natural
language interaction seems archaic and slow. By contrast,
the dynamic visual world of direct manipulation brings us
powerful spreadsheets, effective simulations,
livelyvideogames, intuitive data visualizations, convenient pagelayout packages, and engaging graphical user interfaces.
Users are empowered by having a clear predictive model ofsystem performance and a sense of mastery, control, andaccomplishment.
Empiricalstudies consistently findsupport for direct manipulation styles of interaction. I callon those who believe in the anthropomorphic scenarios tobuild something useful and conduct usability studies andcontrolled experiments to compare their designs with direct
manipulation. Direct manipulation designs can often beimproved, but they are a more appealing direction, as far as
I am concerned.
I am sympathetic to human faces
appearing onscreen if they are to represent human beings.
My objection is when the computer is portrayed as ahuman;such misrepresentations
are deceptive,counterproductive, and morally offensive to me.

In the sense that the dogma of direct manipulationprohibits the use of anthropomorphic
or animistic
representations
for complex agencies that exhibitorganicity and/or emergent intelligence, it also precludes
our use of such agencies as tools for thought, creativity, orproductive work. It is not the notion of anthropomorphic
agents that is the real obstacle to human empowerment
through computers, but rather the straitjacket of interface
orthodoxy
and the persistent devaluationof anyphenomenon which cannot be neatly measured incontrolled experiments.

REFERENCES
Ben

Shneiderman

BenShneiderman

is a Professor

inthe Department

1.

ofComputer Science, Head of the Human-Computer
Interaction
Laboratory,and Memberof the Systems
Research Center, all at the Universityof Maryland
at2.

Cyborgs,andHaraway, Donna. Simians,
Routledge, New York, New York, 1991.

Kay,Alan.

American.

69

Computer

Software.

InWomen.

Scientific251,3 (September, 1984), pp. 52-59.

May3-7, 1992

~ (Hi ’92
3.

Laurel, Brenda. Interface Agents: Metaphors withInte~ace
Character. In The Art of Human-Computer
Design. Addison-Wesley, Reading, MA, 1990.

7.

Addison-Wesley, Reading, MA, 1987.

January 13, 1991, pp. 1.

8.

4.

MacWeek,

5.

Mumford, Lewis. Technics and Civilization. Harcourt
Brace and World, Inc., New York, NY, 1934.

6.

Shatz, M., & Gelman, R. The development ofcommunication skills Modifications in the speech ofyoung children as a function of listener. Monographsof the Society for Research
38,5 (1973), 1-37.

in Child

Shneiderman, Ben. Designing
the User Interface:
Strategies for Effective Human-Computer
Interaction

9.

Sutherland, I.E. Sketchpad: A man-machine graphicalcommunication system. M.I.T. Lincoln Laboratory
Technical Report no. 296, Lexington, MA. 1963.
Turkle, Sherry. The Second Self: Computers and theSimon & Schuster, New York, NY,Spirit,
1984.

HumanDevelopment.

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