MyCHI

I’m still holding out some hope to become a Student Volunteer at CHI 2007. I’m #138, with a bullet! (Albeit, now that the February 26th registration deadline for the actual SV has passed, a very slow moving bullet that may, in fact, be resting on a table somewhere. But at least I can see the bottom of the volunteer list on the same screen as my name now.) In the meantime …

I’ve been thinking about the conference schedule over the past several days. I wish I could take some courses while at CHI, but the conflicts with paper presentations and other events aren’t going to allow it. Too bad, as Information Foraging Theory, with Peter Pirolli (PARC), and Ajax – Design and Usability, with William Hudson (Syntagm), sure looked interesting. Instead, my likely schedule for the four-day event looks like this:

Monday
8:30a-10a – Opening Plenary: Reaching for the Intuitive, by IDEO co-founder Bill Moggridge.

11:30a-1p – Looks like Capturing Life Experiences, which includes research on use of home video and effectiveness of journaling in memory recall.

2:30p-4p – It kills me a bit to have to skip Terry Winograd’s panel on design and coursework (#7 and #9), but I need to go to the session on Politics and Activism.

4:30p-6p – Headed for some experience reports on Qualitative Research Methods.

Tuesday
8:30a-10a – Gary Mardsen talks about developing a world context through HCI.

11:30a-1p – Part of the Design Theory session includes Eli Blevis’ talk on sustainable design. Cool. Wanting to see this and support Eli killed one of the course options for me.

2:30p-4p – Tough choice in the afternoon. Either Education & Culture experience reports, or Programming by Professionals, papers that deal with using software to help programmers.

4:30p-6p – I may wind up splitting time between Games and Emergency Action.

Wednesday
8:30a-10a – Tuesday may be my late night in San Jose (or perhaps San Francisco, where I’ll be staying). A history of HCI plenary by Jim Foley might be interesting, but …

11:30a-1p – Assuming any of the eight Big Ten teams are in the final, the CHI Student competition takes precedence over a myriad of interesting sessions, especially Emotion & Empathy (with a paper on “Patterns of empathy in online communication”).

2:30p-4p – I’m assuming a victory celebration might make this choice irrelevant (Go Hoosiers!), but there are a couple specific papers of interest, like “Software Design and Engineering as a Social Process” and Fernanda Viégas’ “Voyagers and Voyeurs: Supporting Asynchronous Collaborative Information Visualization.”

4:30p-6p – A little Social Network Sharing … a little Ethnography

Thursday
9a-10:30a – It’s all about the Kids (& Family). Most looking forward to the one entitled, “Comicboarding: Using Comics as Proxies for Participatory Design with Children.”

11:30a-1p – The plenary by Gregory Abowd (Georgia Tech) on autism and technology may be interesting.

2:30p-4p – I’ll have to decide soon, but this may be my one chance for a course, the 1-unit Interaction Design Studio. Otherwise, I’ll likely split time between Learning—in particular, the “Multiple Mice for Retention Tasks in Disadvantaged Schools” paper by Udai Pawar and others—and Social Influence, which has some stuff on virtual humans/agents.

4:30p-6p – The closing plenary will have Niti Bhan talking about “How do you communicate value across cultures?.” If her work with South African design consulting studio Readymade is any indication—they espouse a philosophy of constrained design which focuses on sustainability—this won’t be the traditional marketing message.

Plus, every morning there is an entertaining (as well as informative) CHI Madness session, a fast-paced concatenation of 30-seconds previews for all papers, notes, and experience of the day. I also very much want to organize an unconference session while out there, maybe looking ahead at CHI 2012 (#30).