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Vol.28 No.2, April 1996
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About 155 delegates from Australasia and Western Europe attended OZCHI '95 from 27-30 November, at the University of Wollongong, Australia. One-third were from industry, one-half from academia, and one-sixth from government. Nearly 11% were from Europe.
UI development methods led a field of nearly 60 papers, which also addressed visualisation, user modeling, organisational and societal issues, cognition and creativity, groupwork, and usability evaluation. All are in the 342-page hardcopy Proceedings. Slides from several presentations, plus digitised photos of conference events, have been issued on CD as the OZCHI '95 Companion. (Contact: Helen Hasan, Dept. of Business Systems, Univ. of Wollongong, NSW 2500; h.hasan@uow.edu.au )
In addition to a trans-Pacific teleconference with Don Norman, OZCHI '95 featured four keynote presentations. LUTCHI's Ernest Edmonds questioned the impact of task analysis upon user creativity; John Carroll (Virginia Tech) described the Blacksburg Electronic Village's use of interface design history (http://history.bev.net/bevhist/); Victor Kaptelinin (Univ. of Ume, Sweden) reviewed psychological Activity Theory; Steve Draper (Univ. of Glasgow) proposed specifying alternative methods rather than single user procedures for tasks. Tutorials
About 80 delegates attended two days of tutorials. Topics included participatory GUI design, usability engineering, imaginary interfaces, interactive learning, CSCW, cognitive issues, multimedia design, interactive conference proceedings, and interaction design. Presenters included Tom Dayton (Bellcore), Tom Hewett (Drexel), and Jim Alty (LUTCHI).
The "Interactive Experience", a multimedia exhibit, was sponsored by The Hiser Consulting Group. (Additional support for OZCHI '95 was provided by the Australian Computer Society, Holos Management Systems, and SAS.)
The exhibit featured work by Sally Pryor (Univ. of Technology, Sydney) linking interface design to the development of writing, and by Fiona Ingram (Hiser) describing how the web can support less contained navigation and more alluring information delivery.
OZCHI '95 featured four paper tracks plus a substantial block of plenary sessions, each day. Conference Chair Helen Hasan said that the schedule was tight; a third day for the main conference would have made it less rushed. She noted that although last year's OZCHI had three tracks, previously the conference had offered one track only. Helen also said that part of the schedule bind this year arose from the fact that (to her surprise) all of the invited speakers had accepted -- including those from the U.S. and U.K. LUTCHI's Jim Alty felt the four-track format was too ambitious for a conference of this size; that three streams would have encouraged better attendance and more audience interaction. He also said, however, that both the keynotes and tutorials were lively, including substantial interaction between presenters and delegates.
The Computer Human Interaction Special Interest Group of the Ergonomics Society of Australia will sponsor OZCHI '96 at Hamilton, New Zealand, from 24-27 November. (Contact: Mark Apperley, Dept. of Computer Science, Univ. of Waikato, Private Bag 3105, Hamilton; ozchi96@cs.waikato.ac.nz; http://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~jvenable/ozchi96.html). This will be the first time OZCHI has been held outside of Australia.
INTERACT '97, to be held in Sydney from 14-18 July, also will have an unprecedented venue (in this case, outside of Europe). Contact: The Australian Convention & Travel Services, Unit 4, 24-26 Mort Street, Braddon, ACT 2601 Australia; Tel: +61 6 257 3299; Fax: +61 6 257 3256; Email: interact97@acts.ccmail.compuserve.com
Donald L. Day is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Information Systems, The University of New South Wales, Sydney. He also is Project Manager for CADPRO, an international consortium that is developing an experimental CASE tool which supports the relaxation of process constraints as part of adaptive user modelling; email: Donald_Day.chi@xerox.com.
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