Blogs



Planning and designing for the inevitable

Posted: Wed, August 26, 2020 - 12:08:58

If there is one big lesson from Covid-19, it is that we live in a world of risk. Disasters and epidemics and pandemics are part and parcel of the fabric of our existence—although that recognition makes them no less tragic when they occur. The Covid-19 catastrophe can be traced back to the actions of only a handful of people, yet…

Auto-UI: Global perspectives

Posted: Wed, August 12, 2020 - 10:40:49

ACM SIGCHI Auto-UI is a growing community, but one in which some continents were less involved than expected and hoped for. For the 2019 conference in Utrecht, the Netherlands, we made various targeted attempts to grow and diversify our international community, with support from the ACM SIGCHI Development Fund. Our efforts resulted in a growth in the number of Asian…

Learning and education in HCI: A reflection on the SIG at CHI 2019

Posted: Tue, August 04, 2020 - 11:09:15

The field of human-computer interaction (HCI) has always been interested in aspects of learning. HCI researchers have spent decades investigating how people learn to use interfaces, with designing for learnability being a key HCI design principle. And with technology constantly changing, everyone from developers to end users must constantly (re)learn how to use, adapt, and improve the tools around them.…

Online embodied interaction: Learning physical interaction design online

Posted: Mon, August 03, 2020 - 10:22:03

On March 17, 2020, the rector at Uppsala University, Sweden, declared that all teaching would move online, effective immediately. The authors of this blog post were teachers and students in a full-time course on Embodied Interaction, scheduled to start on March 26. This is a design course in which students apply social, spatial, bodily, and material theories to a design…

How we need to change for more inclusive and open publication practices

Posted: Fri, July 10, 2020 - 11:18:44

Tldr; While progress toward more inclusive and open publications can be made through top-down policy, power within SIGCHI is distributed across a wide range of volunteers beyond the Executive Committee, for example conference Steering Committees, conference leadership, and the author and reviewer communities. The real work of enacting change comes from advocacy at all these levels: We could reduce bias…

Announcing a new CHI subcommittee: Critical and Sustainable Computing

Posted: Wed, July 08, 2020 - 10:30:03

Reflecting rising interest in sustainability, social justice, aesthetic experiences, and critical computing throughout the HCI community in the past decade, ACM CHI now features a subcommittee devoted to such concerns: the Subcommittee on Critical and Sustainable Computing. Pursuing meaningful alternatives to the status quo, the subcommittee will encourage papers that explore how computing and computing research may contribute to fair…

For CS

Posted: Tue, July 07, 2020 - 11:27:18

In the text that follows, we share our conversations during the early days of the pandemic. In this moment when many things get reduced to usefulness, we propose stories that are positioned to teach us more connection, how to be in contact, and with less certainty. In this conversation, we draw on Fred Moten’s concept of chance and scandal, and…

Heeding the call for action

Posted: Thu, July 02, 2020 - 10:40:23

Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing the ground. — Frederick Douglass [1] It's time to implement the immensely clear action items Christina N. Harrington, Yolanda Rankin, Jasmine Jones, Robin Brewer, Sheena Erete, Tawanna Dillahunt, Quincy Brown, and others list in their “Call to Action for the ACM” and “Open…

Reflections on planning and running a virtual Doctoral Consortium at CHI 2020

Posted: Tue, June 30, 2020 - 10:28:52

This article describes what was done to run a virtual Doctoral Consortium at CHI 2020. The event was originally planned as an in-person, two-day event to take place in Honolulu, Hawaii, on April 25–26, 2020. Because of the Covid-19 pandemic, the decision was taken in March that the CHI conference would not go ahead as a physical event. Most events…

The best tech for contact tracing? Systems designed for healthcare workers

Posted: Fri, June 26, 2020 - 2:37:22

Given the ongoing sense of urgency, some, particularly in technology circles, wonder if waiting for a healthcare worker to track down the virus makes sense. In a fight that depends on quickly finding and containing the coronavirus, couldn’t we do more with our mobile phones to put our country in a better position? Could the digital technologies that already connect…