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Vol.30 No.4, October 1998
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I didn't attend CHI 98. But I would have liked to.
In my mind I imagine what it might have been like: warm, breezy downtown Los Angeles, if there even is such as place; the bland and artificially cooled interior of some behemoth conference center; the crowds milling around during coffee breaks-talking, or checking the conference schedule for the thousandth time; people wandering around alone or with old friends they only ever see at CHI; compulsively checking the message board like you compulsively check your email back home.
Not many of the people I know went to the conference. I talked briefly to a few who did. One colleague spent most of her time in her hotel room, working on a project so urgent it couldn't wait a few days for her return to Silicon Valley. Other conversations produced such wildly disparate stories, that, if I didn't know CHI, I'd think these people had gone to completely different conferences.
I'm left, then, with a sort of archeological problem, trying to fathom the conference by examining the artifacts that were left behind. A peek at the SIGCHI homepage holds no trace of the conference; already looking to the future, CHI 99 takes precedence. With a little digging, however, the CHI 98 pages reveal themselves to me. There are some press releases, written for another audience, and a photo album featuring 113 images from the conference. These images mainly confirm my impressions (or rather memories) of conferences: endless escalators and drab chairs, smiling groups of people. They raise more questions than they answer: so what were the CHI Kids doing by invading the plenary? The images don't tell.
Since the web site isn't much help, I turn to the Conference Proceedings, and its oddly named companion, the CHI 98 Summary (if only!), which I have borrowed from a colleague. They are big. They immediately give me the impression that it impossible to stay on top of the latest developments in the field, even if these bulky books represented all of the HCI work going on in the world -- which, of course, they don't. I lug them around, finding them somewhat difficult to leaf through while standing in the crowded rush-hour train. As I look, I tag the articles that I might like to read. Some look interesting, which is encouraging.
Still skimming, I notice that there are no design briefings, at least explicitly named, this year, since they have been merged with regular papers. There are no recognizably VID-oriented SIGs, and the only recognizably VID-oriented paper is one whose results were reported informally last year, and which is, not surprisingly, firmly couched in traditional research paradigms. I see a lot of education-related papers (not surprising, given that this is always a big research area), a few medical ones, and a smattering of entertainment topics, and wonder how the new applications-oriented submission categories worked. Were they coherent? Were the papers good? Did the conference-goers find it a new and refreshing approach? There's no story here, only information.
My other impression is that, like the year before, the most interesting work seems to spring from the late-breaking papers section. The colleague who loaned me the Proceedings suggests that the only way for design-oriented work to get into the conference is through the categories that, because they represent work "in progress," don't have to be judged by traditional CHI criteria. Overall, my quick journey through these artifacts leaves me with two questions. First, does the conference have any responsibility to members of the society who, for financial or work-related reasons, cannot attend? And second, is CHI working for VID, or are we working for ourselves?
Compared to some other conferences, CHI offers less support to those who cannot attend. For example, the Doors of Perception conferences capture the day-to-day ambience of the conference through web reporting (see http://www.doorsofperception.com). Miller Freeman's Web 98 conference also had extensive web reporting during the conference, including live interviews (see http://www.mfweb.com/archive). In addition, the Doors conference organizers transcribe speakers' talks. This is necessary in part because there are no Proceedings for these conferences; all the same, transcription would be very useful for invited talks at CHI, such as the opening and closing plenaries. This practice would do more than simply allow people to experience the conference remotely; it would also better support researchers. For example, I was recently using the ACM digital library to look for papers on convergence. One of the most intriguing and directly relevant hits was for a CHI plenary speech. Unfortunately, the library contained only the abstract.
CHI is different, too, from smaller conferences that support a more intimate, shared experience amongst the attendees. For example, after the International Institute for Information Design (IIID) conference, which was covered in the July VID column, there was a rather interesting discussion via the InfoD listserv, concerning one of the presentations in particular. The fact that a large percentage of the attendees had seen the talk made it easier to continue the conversation after everyone had gone home. These conversations also helped me learn something from a conference I hadn't attended. These conferences remind me of how a distributed team might work, coming together every so often to have a face-to-face meeting, then retreating back home and continuing work via email and FAX. Perhaps the workshops and SIGs at CHI retain this flavor, but not CHI as a whole, and apparently not VID either. VISUAL-L has been pretty silent.
I'm left, in general, with a feeling that CHI is still not working for us, or perhaps we are not working for ourselves. Are we the victims of marginalization? Apathy? Or simply time and organization? Volunteerism doesn't work if people don't have the time to make things happen; things don't get done when no one is in charge and responsible. Perhaps as a group, we need to find someone every year or two to organize VID events at the conference and, more importantly, to shepherd VID interests within the larger community of CHI. Someone who might get us a link and a page under the "SIG" heading on the SIGCHI home page.
My work at the moment is really less about visual interfaces than it is about people's experience, and how the things we work with, the messages we hear, and the way we think about the world affect those experiences. From this perspective, the conference experience becomes an interesting subject for study. What is its role in our professional lives? How do we navigate the event? How do we use what we learn after we leave? What happens when we can't go? Does the conference have a responsibility to think about how it serves the professional society at large, or is it concerned only with the event itself? Answering these questions, and others like them, could become the basis for creating new conference experiences, ones that would show CHI innovation on a larger scale. Within this, interest groups such as VID could decide -- if CHI is to remain the forum for furthering our professional standing -- how to make it work better for us.
Shannon Ford is an interaction designer and project manager at E-Lab in Chicago, where she studies behavior and experience to support the design of new products and services. She earned her Master of Design in Interaction Design from Carnegie Mellon University, and writes fluently in both first and third person.
Shannon Ford
213 W. Institute Place, Suite 509
Chicago, IL 60610 USA
email: sford@elab.com
Tel: +1 312.640.4459
Your comments, ideas, and submissions are welcome. Send email to the editors, Frank Marchak or Shannon Ford, at chi-Bulletin-VID@acm.org. Alternatively, you can write to Shannon Ford at 213 W. Institute Place, Suite 509, Chicago, IL 60610 USA.
Visual Interaction Design is a special interest group of SIGCHI that acts as a focal point for visual interaction design and product design interests within SIGCHI. Its goal is to advance visual interaction design as an integral component of HCI, and to integrate the visual interaction design community with the rest of SIGCHI.
A listserv exists to support the community. To subscribe, send email to listserv@vtvm1.cc.vt.edu with the single line in the body:
subscribe VISUAL-L <your name>.
You can also access this list via net news: internet.computing.visual-l.
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Vol.30 No.4, October 1998 |
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