That's a point Ben Shneiderman insisted on making in 1983, when he named his "Human Computer Interaction Lab" at the University of Maryland HCIL instead of CHIL, where I worked with him from 1986-1990. Go Terps! ;)

Do you have any citations of European or other labs using that human-first convention before 1983?

University of Maryland Human–Computer Interaction Lab:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Maryland_Human%E...

Ben Shneiderman:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Shneiderman

Ben also coined the term "Direct Manipulation", and came up with the design of making links blue for the early HyperTIES hypermedia system we developed at HCIL.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_manipulation_interface

Revisiting why hyperlinks are blue (blog.mozilla.org):

https://blog.mozilla.org/en/internet-culture/why-are-hyperli...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29897811

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29921532

>Ben Shneiderman recalled that "Tim told me at the time that he was influenced by our design as he saw it in the Hypertext on Hypertext project".

Hypertext on Hypertext CACM1988:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29b4O2xxeqg

30 YEARS AT THE UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND’S HUMAN-COMPUTER INTERACTION LAB (HCIL). (2013) By Ben Shneiderman, Kent Norman, Catherine Plaisant, Benjamin Bederson, Allison Druin, Jennifer Golbeck:

http://interactionsdev.acm.org/archive/view/september-octobe...

>One attraction of the University of Maryland was its strong psychology department. My computing colleagues were intrigued by my early attempts to use empirical techniques to study programmers as they wrote, modified, or debugged programs. These crossover ideas caught the attention of Azriel Rosenfeld (1931–2004), a world leader in computer vision, who was forming an interdisciplinary Center for Automation Research (CfAR). He led the Computer Vision Lab and invited me to form a Human-Computer Interaction Lab when he launched CfAR in 1983. In a campus reorganization, HCIL became a unit in the Institute for Advanced Computer Studies and eventually became jointly managed with the iSchool.

>Rosenfeld's invitation advanced my efforts by at least five years, giving credibility to the "marriage of computer science and psychology," which I described in my 1980 book, Software Psychology. Gaining credibility was important, as this was still a time when many computer scientists were unsure about the value of psychological studies of programmers and database systems' users, and even the growing field of interactive computer systems. The term human-computer interaction (HCI) was still novel, but I insisted on putting the human first, as opposed to the ACM's choice of computer-human interaction to make a more pronounceable name, "CHI."

Ken Perlin:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Perlin

Ken Perlin's Blog:

http://blog.kenperlin.com/?p=237

>Human first (May 29th, 2008)

>I spent the day today at the annual end-of-year symposium of the Human Computer Interaction Lab (HCIL) at the University of Maryland. All three of the Lab’s successive directors – Ben Shneiderman, Ben Bederson and Allison Druin – were there, and they are all good friends of mine. Ben Shneiderman founded the lab in 1983. He is one of the fathers of the field of HCI research, and is a font of wisdom on many subjects. Ben Bederson, with whom I’ve been friends since he was in grad school, took over the lab directorship in 2000. Allison, who is married to Ben Bederson, became the lab’s director in 2006. I actually know Allison the longest of the three. I have had lots of time to talk with all three of them in the last twenty four hours, which has been great fun.

>The wonderful thing about the HCIL, as Allison pointed out today, is that it puts the “human” first. Much of computer science research seems to forget that there are such things as humans. Instead it seems to be a quest for a kind of abstract algorithmic purity, as though computer science were merely a branch of mathematics. The HCIL people have been way ahead of the curve in recognizing that the real power of computers comes when we find ways to interweave that power with the complementary power of the human mind. Computation is indeed enormously powerful, but computation that augments human thought is downright transformative. And to achieve that, you’ve got to understand human thought.

>This is rather tricky for many academics, because it requires bridging the large gap in scientific subcultures between computer science on the one hand, and psychology on the other. It’s very hard to get academic recognition when any given reviewer of your manuscript is not going to understand half of what you are saying. To me the people at HCIL are visionary because they recognized, a full quarter of a century ago – long before it was fashionable – the need to reconcile these two parts of the problem.

>And they are still at it. Only now the world is starting to catch up.

>Ben Shneiderman says on June 3, 2008 at 8:12 pm:

>Thanks Ken… for your kind words and thoughtful contribution to the 25th Anniversary events…. it’s great to see that our message was heard and received in a warm human way.
Sincerely… Ben Shneiderman

Designing to Facilitate Browsing: A Look Back at the Hyperties Workstation Browser:
By Ben Shneiderman, Catherine Plaisant, Rodrigo Botafogo, Don Hopkins, William Weiland. Published in Hypermedia, vol. 3, 2 (1991)101–117.

https://donhopkins.medium.com/designing-to-facilitate-browsi...

HyperTIES Discussions from Hacker News:

https://donhopkins.medium.com/hyperties-discussions-from-hac...

An Empirical Comparison of Pie vs. Linear Menus:
Jack Callahan, Don Hopkins, Mark Weiser (*) and Ben Shneiderman. Computer Science Department University of Maryland College Park, Maryland 20742
(*) Computer Science Laboratory, Xerox PARC, Palo Alto, Calif. 94303.
Presented at ACM CHI’88 Conference, Washington DC, 1988.

https://donhopkins.medium.com/an-empirical-comparison-of-pie...