Myers Awarded 2025 CBI Human-Computer Interaction History Prize

MINNEAPOLIS / ST. PAUL (05/22/2025) — Carnegie Mellon University Professor in the School of Computer Science and Director of the HCI Institute Brad A. Myers is the co-recipient of the 2025 CBI Human Computer Interaction (HCI) History Prize for his book Pick, Click, Flick!: The Story of Interaction Techniques (ACM Books, 2024).  This is a reflective and highly impressive monument of a book by one of the foremost scientists in Human-Computer Interaction. 

Spanning its eight hundred pages, it is at once a reference book, collection of valuable primary research/documents (including oral histories with top pioneers in interaction), and a textbook. A decade in the writing, it grew out of Myers’ Carnegie Mellon University course on interactive techniques that he taught continuously over ten years. Its first chapters expertly and insightfully present and analyze the history of interaction techniques with desktop computers and with mobile devices. Myers then goes on to explore wide-ranging topics and themes in interactive devices, all with a keen eye toward historical contexts. 

This whirlwind of topics ranges from menus, buttons, and scroll to text, spreadsheets, games, mice, printers, light pens, tablets, smartphones, and so much more. Importantly, in examining design and use Myers relates not just successes but also failures, the latter of which are all too frequently ignored in histories of design and technology. Myers identifies historians first as the audience, and it will be an incredibly useful book for historians of technology and historians and STS scholars of HCI. He relates he also authored it for designers, inventors, lawyers, and scholars and students. 

It is a fascinating book and a wondrous achievement that will be useful to all these audiences. We are very grateful to HCI pioneer Prof. Ben Shneiderman for making this annual award possible.