Explainable AI: A Brief History of the Concept

Understandability of computers has been a research topic from the very early days, but more systematically from the 1980s, when human-computer interaction started to take shape. In their book published in 1986, Winograd and Flores [1] extensively dealt with the issues of explanations and transparency. They set out to replace vague terms like "user-friendly", "easy-to-learn" and "self-explaining" with scientifically grounded design principles. They did this by relying on phenomenology and, especially, cognitive science. Their key message was that a system needs to reflect how the user's mental representation of the domain of use is structured. From our current vantage point, almost four decades later, we can see that this was the user-facing variation of a similar idea, but for developers - object-oriented programming, a method on the rise at the time.