A very intense CHI conference

The CHI 2019 conference ended yesterday. It was the most intense CHI I’ve ever had — I was on stage five times in two days. (In fact, it was the most intense conference experience of any kind that I’ve ever had.) Here’s a brief run-down of my activities.

alt.chi presenting

I started by presenting my alt.chi paper in the 9am session on Tuesday, after getting up at 4:15 that morning and finally finishing my slides about 8:15. (It’s easier for me to get up early than to stay up late.) Several people told me it was really good and said it should have been a full paper. I’m pondering how to enrich it for submission to another SIGCHI conference.

Diversity and Inclusion Lunch

For the past few years, CHI has had a Diversity and Inclusion Lunch on the Tuesday, and this year I spoke about doing a PhD as an older student (I started at 60). I won’t say more about that here because I plan a separate blog post on that talk. I’ll just say that my first draft was six minutes long and I had been told to target 3 minutes. I ended up with about 3.5 (which was fine), but it took a good while to cut it down to that and still convey everything important. That talk, too, wasn’t completely finished until almost the last minute (the night before). It was incredibly well received; see my blog post about that specific talk.

UX Event

I had the role of Industry Liaison for this year’s conference, and the main thing I did for that was to organize and chair a “UX event” on the Tuesday evening to get academics and practitioners exploring together things they could do to help bridge the gap between them. The event started with a talk by Giles Colborne, followed by three brief presentations with ideas for addressing the problem, followed by more than an hour of working together to create bridging ideas and plans for putting them into practice. This effort builds on previous work (mainly at CHI conferences) regarding research-practice interaction. This event was very popular, and we had a fantastically even balance between academics and practitioners. I ascribe much of the academic interest in the event to the REF (Research Excellence Framework), a newish way of evaluating UK universities’ research that includes its impact outside of academia. The event was partially successful — some folks thought it was fabulous and others (including myself) expressed concerns — and I’m still collecting outputs from it and have created a Slack team in hopes of fostering further discussion and bridge building. (If you’d like to join the Slack team, send me your email address; and if I don’t know you, tell me why you want to join and/or what you see yourself contributing.)

Session chairing

On Wednesday I chaired a paper session. I hadn’t had time to read the papers closely (my bad!) but I had at least read the abstracts and I had some idea of what they were about. And of course I paid attention to the presentations. One of a session chair’s most important responsibilities is to keep the session on time: CHI sessions generally have four presentations each, and the presentations are timed to start and end at fixed times (for the last few years they’ve had 20 minutes each, including Q&A), and I had to cut one presenter off before he was finished and hold another back from starting two minutes early. A key person in SIGCHI told me later that I had amazing session-chairing skills (I think he was referring to my timekeeping), which pleased me inordinately.

SIG co-chairing

I collaborated with two people to run a special interest group (SIG) at the conference (and two additional people to write the proposal for it); our SIG was on technology to foster transformative experiences. I was a relatively minor figure in this one, so it wasn’t very stressful for me.

Future possibilities

Several things came out of various discussions.

My PhD supervisor was there for part of the time, and he attended my alt.chi talk (and was one of the people who said it should have been a full paper). We have been invited to write an article for a journal, so we sat down together and worked out a way to approach it. We explained the approach to the journal’s editor, and he agreed in principle. So now we have to write an abstract and get busy on the article.

I suggested to my SIG co-organizers that we explore ideas for collaborating on other research, and we talked for about half an hour about that. There’s an event happening in Milan in about ten days, but unfortunately I can’t go to that because of a work commitment on the same day. I think there’s a lot of potential for that collaboration.

I’ve been invited to Weimar to speak and discuss. I don’t know a great deal about what that’ll turn into, but I trust the person who invited me and I know we’ll work out something good.

And finally, I had lunch on the last day with someone I met at a conference several years ago (while we were both students). He works for a large company that is open to supporting research that might benefit them, and I told him of something I want to know more about (not related to transcendent or transformative experiences, but something else altogether), and he seemed excited about the idea. I’m optimistic on that front as well.

All in all, it was a very good CHI. And I’m very ready to see some castles and abbeys in the Scottish Borders on my way home.