This volume contains the full papers and invited papers from the 1994 conference of the British HCI Group (a specialist group of the British Computer Society). It is a partial record of a more extensive conference that includes tutorials, panels, short papers, posters and demonstrations.

Human-Computer Interaction has been consolidating over the last few years. As a result, many recent conferences have tended to be bland, without really high points or really low points. The invited papers are forward looking and avoid blandness in that way. There are, however, many forward looking full papers. Moreover, the 1994 conference will be remembered as one that moved HCI forward in some areas, rather than just documented its current state within the established areas.

Proceedings Structure

The proceedings begin with the invited papers. This apart, the usual compromises of programme structure have not been carried forward into these proceedings. The full papers in this volume have been reorganised into broad topics. As ever in HCI, these topics are not disjoint and some papers could have easily have gone in one section as another. Readers interested in specific topics are thus advised to read through the full contents to avoid missing papers that may be of interest to them.

The second group of papers covers all stages of interactive systems development (properly iterated of course) from requirements capture and specification, through to evaluation. There are also papers on specific design issues, including application areas such as computer-assisted learning.

The third group of papers is the largest, and covers design knowledge at all levels of abstraction in interactive systems, from low level presentation to high level metaphors.