Reflecting on UIST 2020

UIST 2020 took place virtually in 2020, with the main program on Oct 21–23. Originally scheduled to take place in Minneapolis, USA, collocated with our sister conference ACM CSCW, the switch to virtual meant that we needed a complete overhaul of how we planned and ran the conference. We would like to share the decisions we made and the underlying considerations behind our decision making with the hope that this may be useful to other conference planners as they plan for virtual or hybrid conferences in the near and long-term future. Since this was the first time UIST was virtual, we also created extensive documentation detailing key components — e.g technical infrastructure, how-to-guides for participants and so on.

Click here to read our Design Journey Overview, which details our experience of adapting to an online-only conference. We share technical details, social interaction and other adaptations for our 700-person virtual-only conference!

This document was written and assembled by the UIST 2020 General Chairs Shamsi Iqbal and Karon MacLean, with contributions from Michelle Annette, Jeeeun Kim, Jingyi Li, Doga Dogan, Nadya Peak, David Lindlbauer, Thomas Langerak, Karan Ahuja, Elena Glassman and Ailie Fraser.