CHI 2009
CHI conference is the premier HCI conference - at least, so most of them say. However, after having visited CHI for the third time now, I have to admit I feel different.
Surely, compared to other conferences, CHI has lots to offer: Papers, Notes, Interactivity (Demos), a Video Showcase, Posters and loads of workshops. While most of the venues (everything that is not a "Paper" or a "Note") are crispy and entertaining, CHI's core has - at least for me - become somewhat boring.
Finding out how fast a person can click a target under certain circumstances, if that behavior is a function of distance and difficulty (I'm referring to Fitts' law here, an often-cited relict from the early years of HCI, that seems to be still of interest in the CHI community.) seems to be quite safely acquirable knowledge, but its impact on the everyday-life of anyone on this planet is not clear to me. Personally, I have changed my strategy: Last year, I began to sit only on edge seats, so I could walk out easily. This year, I rarely sat down.
I cannot be sure whether I am alone with my opinion, but the percentage of people in the audience with their laptops open, checking their email, or simply browsing the web, tells me that I am not. Furthermore, I appreciated the invited panel in which Christoph Bartneck talked about his work in which he analysed CHI's acceptance rates, best paper awards and general development over the years; speaking to other attendees about my opinion and Christoph's work confirmed my feeling of a change that might be not too far away: From pickily comparing selection techniques towards designing for using computation's power to improve everyday life, interdisciplinarily.
Lastly, the closing plenary by Kees Overbeeke foreshadowed the growing influence of the design discipline on HCI, where once sociologists, psychologists and computer scientists clashed. And, really, CHI is a conference of clashing paradigms: Sociologist meets computer scientist meets psychologist - and already, that is not the end of this list. Different philosophies of knowledge acquisition come together, and it's often hard to accept the fundamental assumptions underlying the work of others (no wonder that, being a designer, I prefer knowledge in artifacts, as shown in the Video Showcase, or in Interactivity, over the mathematically acquired knowledge in click-speed studies).
Refreshingly, other projects with much more impact find their way into the conference, including a big portion of sustainability-related projects. For me, the clear highlights of this year's edition of CHI were Christoph Bartneck's work and Chris Harrison's fantastic shape-changing displays.
I will still be an attendee of future CHI conferences, but it is no longer the first on my list.