It is a great honour to be appointed as the next editor-in-chief of Behaviour and Information Technology. As someone who has spent all his professional life working on different areas of the field of human–computer interaction and who has learnt to value the perspectives of the very diverse disciplines contributing in this field, I am particularly grateful to be given this opportunity to work in a historic journal with an outspoken inter-disciplinary focus and a substantial impact on the study of human-centred information technology.
BIT was launched in 1982, before I started my own university studies and before I even suspected the importance of the challenges that this field addresses. In his editorial to the first issue of this journal, Tom Stewart, the founding editor of BIT, pointed out the fundamental challenges relating to understanding human behaviour and the importance of taking it into account when designing software and hardware. While a long time has elapsed and the technology has evolved and continues to evolve dramatically, the importance and magnitude of these challenges has not diminished. The range of human behaviours that scholars in this field address is clearly much broader now as computing is embedded in almost every aspect of human life and new and perhaps unforeseen human endeavours and behaviours have emerged surrounding the use of these technologies. How people will use information technology and how such technology use can impact human behaviour are important questions that concern not only the computing and communication industries, but society at large and diverse sectors such as commerce, health, and education.
Looking to the future, it is as important now as when the journal started to take a human-centred perspective and to welcome contributions from scholars in diverse fields of inquiry, bringing to bear different theoretical considerations and methods of inquiry.
BIT has been tremendously fortunate to have Ahmet Cakir as an editor who has ensured a high quality, coherence and impact for this journal. As I take over from Ahmet, I will try my utmost to continue the fine work he has done, and I can only hope that I will be as successful as he was in tracking new developments in the field but also in the publishing world.
In this change of guard, my priority is to ensure the fast publication of papers that have been submitted some time ago to the journal and to give precedence to this over their thematic clustering. Therefore, this issue brings together a few works that have been initially submitted some time ago, even as early as 2014, and for which fast publication was very crucial.
It is perhaps unnecessary or premature to describe a new direction for the journal. This is really shaped together with the readership of the journal, the authors submitting, the reviewers and editors of the journal. We expect the focus on human behaviour to continue to be the common thread, while the journal expands its focus to new technologies and new uses of technology.