SIGCHI at 40
The year is fast coming to a close, and with that our modest celebrations for SIGCHI’s 40th also. Susan Dray (SIGCHI Partnerships Chair) and I are excited to share with you the compilation of memories and aspirations that was the special issue of Interactions for November of 2022, courtesy the efforts of dozens who gave their time to this project. I thank once again Steven Pemberton for bringing up the 40th anniversary in an open EC meeting earlier this year, and summarize the SIGCHI-40 contributions in this special issue below.
The welcome note from the Editors-in-Chief and Susan/me says a little about what SIGCHI has been and what it has become:
Over the years, SIGCHI has grown and changed with the times and the technology as well as with our expanding awareness of what it means to be a professional organization in this area. Little did we envision, way back in 1982, that our ranks would swell to thousands of members across every continent except Antarctica.
The Community Square contribution of this issue — The Road We’re On — lays out our roles and responsibilities, as seen by the Executive Committee, towards our conferences, the community at large, our global identity, and the institution itself. We invite you to read this and hold us to/help us fulfill our promises. Among other commitments:
SIGCHI’s global, regional, and local presence is growing. We intend to catalyze this growth by extending support to events sponsored or supported by SIGCHI so that they are globally diverse and inclusive, and ensuring that locally and regionally hosted events have the infrastructural supports they need. It is our commitment to facilitate mutual learning across communities, crossing regional, cultural, institutional, and disciplinary borders, and to provide relevant information and guidance to existing and emergent SIGCHI chapters around the world. For this, we will foster new partnerships with local and global organizations — groups with SIGCHI-adjacent interests. We also aspire to make locally relevant HCI educational resources easier to access.
In SIGCHI at 40: Celebrations and Aspirations, Kun et al. share the conversations that unfolded before/at/after the panel at CHI 2022 of the same name. With representatives from various corners of SIGCHI, Andrew Kun (SIGCHI Executive VP) moderated a most engaging panel to discuss what we should celebrate upon achieving this milestone, and what challenges lie ahead of us to overcome. Quoting Jonathan Grudin (who was one of our panelists):
Consider your colleagues. Most of us work in small, trusting groups. We see technolog y’s positive potential and rarely think about how our work will be used by bad actors. Technologies always have unintended consequences, good, bad, or neutral. In the past, they unfolded over decades. Today, they can scale in days. We owe it to the world to frequently and thoughtfully consider all possible consequences of our work, and possible consequences of work that we review.
Adriana S. Vivacqua (SIGCHI VP at Large) wrote a piece on Becoming a Global Organization that digs into our archives to trace how SIGCHI acquired a global identity, and how this continues to grow. In our current EC, we are intent on enriching our global presence, through understanding the priorities and challenges faced by the members of our community dispersed across the globe. The article quotes Steven Pemberton on challenges that are second nature to us now:
Going international is a leading theme in SIGCHI’s development aims, indeed of ACM as a whole, and featuring internationalism is all the more fitting for me since, considering my location (here in Amsterdam), I’m having to learn very quickly what it means to work in a multi-national organisation: hour-long international phone calls; trying to find out what timezone someone is in, or when day-light saving changes, so that I don’t go and wake them up, or so that when they ask me to phone at 10.30, I actually know what that means; the problems of getting material across the ocean in a time frame of less than a number of months; transferring money internationally; spell-checking articles written by people from different spelling regions.
Susan Dray, co-founding member of SIGCHI and my co-guest editor of this special issue, collated stories from a diverse set of authors on the influence that SIGCHI has had on their lives, through conferences and communities, in ‘It Changed my Life’: Stories of SIGCHI’s Influence. In the words of Aaron Marcus, whose reflections are included in this piece:
Over the past four decades, SIGCHI, CHI, and Interactions have each grown and developed into an ever stronger, more mature, more complex organization, event, and publication. In those years, my understanding of CHI’s professionals and the discipline itself has developed far beyond my original conceptions of computers and human-computer interaction. We are both better for having been connected since our beginnings.
And last but certainly not least, I am delighted to share with the world: A Chronology of SIGCHI Conferences: 1983 to 2022, many thanks to the labors of my 32 co-authors and almost as many enablers. In this piece, each conference’s (hi)story is described in up to 150 words, and presents a snapshot of the rich and varied past and present that we share.
Conferences form the backbone of SIGCHI. They are the reason we exist as a collective entity and a special interest group. They connect us and bring us together as a community of human-computer interaction (HCI) researchers, educators, students, and practitioners. In this article, we take stock of SIGCHI’s portfolio of conferences, offering a snapshot of their histories toward better understanding our eclectic knowledge commitments and intertwined journeys. Many thanks to all who helped create this crowdsourced contribution, from current steering committee chairs to inaugural organizers and attendees, and those whose voices reach us by way of online archives. What shines through is the vibrant history of our field, the massive volunteer effort that underlies all of its activities, and a deep, solid commitment to enriching HCI, in research and in practice.
We love that we could present so many aspects of SIGCHI’s past, present, and future with this issue, and yet, these are but a fraction of what SIGCHI was yesterday, is today, and will be tomorrow. Thank you to those who contributed, and our earnest apologies for those we missed in this issue. There will be time to hear from many more. Here’s to the next 40!
Neha Kumar
SIGCHI President
