Futuring SIGCHI: Progress on Projects
Written by the Futuring SIGCHI Committee
In Fall 2022, we formed the Futuring SIGCHI committee, which brought together early career professionals and mentors to imagine ways we can expand the horizons of the SIGCHI community. Since then, our three Futuring teams have been working on piloting projects aimed at expanding forms of participation and representation in the HCI community. Below, we share the motivation and goals of each project and progress made in 2023, and future plans to look out for in 2024!
Emerging Scholars Events
This project is led by Jaydon Farao (University of Cape Town), Tan Gemicioglu (Georgia Institute of Technology), Sarina Till (Varsity College/University of Cape Town), and Doug Zytko, (University of Michigan-Flint), with mentorship from Jan Smeddinck (Ludwig Boltzmann Institute) and Arne Berger (Hochschule Anhalt).
This project was motivated by the fact that SIGCHI conferences are crucial to the growth and success of students, but there are barriers that may prevent them from being able to attend or gain as much out of the conference experience as possible. For example, students may be unfamiliar with conference settings and how to approach conversations with other scholars. They may also be new to research and the HCI community in general and are seeking more welcoming, intentional spaces to socialize. The team’s long-term objective is thus to reduce barriers to SIGCHI conference participation and the benefits that such participation incurs such as professional networking and support, peer feedback and dialogue about one’s research, and identification of collaborators.
The initial project pursuant to this long-term vision was a one-day “Emerging Scholars” event conducted at CSCW 2023, which sought to engage PhD students who 1) have never attended a SIGCHI conference before and 2) have never published a full paper in a SIGCHI conference before. The workshop offered opportunities for mentorship, community-building, reflections on how to approach the conference, and building confidence around skills such as paper writing. Participants also had the ability to check in with one another throughout the conference. Please look out for an upcoming blog post from the team about the event, participants’ experiences, lessons learned, and ideas for integrating such an event into SIGCHI’s practices!
Diversifying Knowledge Sharing Formats in HCI
This project is led by Uğur Genç (Delft University of Technology), Miriam Sturdee (University of St. Andrews), and Vanissa Wanick (University of Southampton), with mentorship from Marianna Obrist (University College London).
In conceptualizing this project, the team was considering how despite the range of ways we communicate in daily life, academic venues, including in HCI, insist on the written word for legitimizing and documenting knowledge. This can limit how sharable, accessible, and wide-reaching our research can be. Support for diverse forms of knowledge-sharing is certainly increasing in some ways within the SIGCHI community, such as venues accepting pictorials, critiques, and interactive demos and performances. However, we are yet to achieve a larger culture change where diverse knowledge-sharing formats are normalized across venues, familiar to researchers and practitioners, and accepted on equal footing with, for example, full papers. The goal of this team’s efforts is to understand how researchers, practitioners, and other stakeholders beyond academia could share and engage with academic research in more diverse ways beyond traditional text-based formats, and to ideate around how these practices can be supported and incentivized.
The team has begun their project by interviewing SIGCHI members who have been involved in conferences or other events that support diverse knowledge-sharing formats, to learn from their experiences. The team has also held a studio at TEI 2024, a SIGCHI conference known for supporting tracks focused on arts, performance, pictorials, and more; here, the goal was to gather more of an understanding of how scholars and practitioners came to build such a culture of knowledge-sharing and see it expanding in the future. Finally, the team will hold a culminating virtual event, engaging the broader SIGCHI community on how we might shift cultures towards diverse knowledge-sharing formats. Here, the aim is to produce recommendations for how SIGCHI can implement such ideas. Look out for more information about this via SIGCHI channels, as well as a blog post update on the TEI studio!
Spotlighting HCI Work in the Global South
This project is led by Sarah Dsane (Koforidua Technical University/University of Cape Town), Aakash Gautam (University of Pittsburgh), and Yi-Chieh Lee (National University of Singapore), with mentorship from Indrani Medhi-Thies.
As SIGCHI has made efforts to expand global participation in the community, this project was motivated by the desire to support awareness of HCI and SIGCHI amongst early-career professionals in the Global South. Based on the team members’ experiences, it can be valuable for those hearing about SIGCHI or HCI as a field for the first time (even if they have been doing HCI-adjacent work otherwise) to have a sense of career paths, successful community-building efforts, and approaches to HCI methods in diverse regions of the world. To this end, the team is working on a podcast to spotlight HCI researchers and practitioners in the Global South in an accessible format. We intend for this content to reach early-career researchers and practitioners across the world, particularly in the Global South, as a repository of case studies that can be used to highlight the value and possibilities of HCI and local community-building. While interviews are ongoing, we aim to create a webpage with podcast episodes, which will be tagged with themes for searchability, and augmented with the podcast guests’ relevant papers, artifacts, and other contributions for further engagement.
