Previous Page
Take Away
TOUCHSTONE: CHI 2011 attendees exchanged contact information via Poken devices (see Take Away,p. 40),which transfer information when touched together.
work-related, Pelletier said,“a lot of the items that we sawwere simply designed to be fun.Butmost of themare designed to enhance your interaction with other people, which I think is what this group does so differently than some of the other conferences that are in the technology space.They have a verydifferentwayof looking at aproblem.” CHI’s Interactivity component is how“a lot of
things come out of this conference,” she added. “Somebody thinks, ‘Hey, I’m going to do this because itwill be fun and I’mgoing to see if I can doit’—andthenallof a sudden, itbecomes some- thing that peoplewant to buy.”
ALearningCulture Not surprisingly, SIGCHI created its own propri- etary content-management system. Volunteers manage all the content:Aninterdisciplinary group plans the educational content, and six communi- ties gather the important points fromdifferent dis-
ciplines, thenbring themtogether at the conference. CHI 2011 featured 18 concurrent tracks. “Youmight see a trackthat’s abouthealthcare,
youmight see a track that’s about blogging, you might see a sessionthat’s aboutFacebook,”Pelleti- er said. “It’s all over the board. You might even have a sessionthat’s about comics.Evenfor anon- techie, the sessions are interesting.” AsCHI is essentially an academic conference,
it’s mostly research papers that are presented. “They might have a 90-minute session, and the presentation [of the research paper] itself is 20 to 25minutes,”Pelletier said.During a90-minute ses- siononFacebook, for example, theremightbe four or five20-minutepresentationsontopics relatedto Facebook.“That encouragesparticipants togetup andmove around,” she said, “because there are a lot of natural breaks.” Moving around the session roomis one thing. But atCHI, it’s a commonly accepted practice to
ON_THE_WEB: For more information about the ACM CHI 2011 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, visit www.chi2011.org. To see the EventBurn CHI 2011 page, visit www.eventburn.com/chi2011. To learn more about Poken, visit www.poken.com.
‘The Power to Transform Persons’ Lives’ According to the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) website (www.acm.org), the “ACM Special Interest Group on Computer- Human Interaction is the world’s largest association of profes- sionals who work in the research and practice of computer- human interaction. This interdisciplinary group is composed of computer scientists, software engineers, psychologists, interac- tion designers, graphic designers, sociolo- gists, and anthropolo- gists, just to name some of the domains whose special expert- ise come to bear in this area. They are brought together by a shared understanding that designing useful and usable technolo- gy is an interdiscipli- nary process, and believe that when done properly it has the power to trans- formpersons’ lives.”