Brian Shackel (ca 1920-)
Brian Shackel is Emeritus Professor of Ergonomics at Loughborough University and the founder of the HUSAT Research Institute. He is one of the pioneers in applying human factors and ergonomics to computer systems. After graduating from Cambridge and following military service, he set up EMI’s human factors group and worked on many systems and product user interfaces. He joined Loughborough University of Technology and set up HUSAT in 1970. He has been an advocate international standards committees and publishing widely. He is the founder and first chairman of the IFIP Technical Committee “Human-Computer Interaction” in 1989.
The prestigious BRIAN SHACKEL AWARD is associated with each IFIP TC13 INTERACT Conference, usually biennial, and is to recognise the most outstanding contribution in the form of a refereed paper submitted to and delivered at the INTERACT conference.
“From early days (cf Licklider & Clark, 1962) the need for larger displays has been emphasised; but just when it seemed, in the late 1980s, that full page and larger displays would come with lower prices, the focus in the industry turned to portability and we moved backward to smaller screens. While there was some improvement, larger screens (eg 21 inch CRT displays) are still not available at an acceptable price; as long ago as 1977 Kay & Goldberg (1977) in their Dynabook concept specified a display the size of a full paper page, but I know of no portable laptop, let alone notebook, which has an A4 page size screen.” (Brian Shackel, 2000)