CHI’21 Experience
This year, I attended the ACM CHI 2021. It was the first time I attended any HCI Conference. It was a great experience for me. And the cherry on the cake — I was fortunate to have received the Gary Marsden Travel Awards for attending and presenting my work at CHI’21. The conference was held virtually and included keynote speeches, paper sessions, Alt.CHI, Workshops, Courses, Research Competition, Doctoral Consortium, and much more!
For me, it all began a week before the actual CHI, I attended the CHIMe workshop where it was a great learning session as I got to learn a lot about PhD in general. In this previous blog post, I wrote down my learnings at the CHIMe workshop.
I attended workshop on “Designing for New Forms of Vulnerability”, where we discussed about new emerging groups of vulnerable population, owing to the pandemic. It was here where me and my colleague from Avanti Fellows, presented the work on The “Bored” Student and the “Powerless” Teacher: The New Vulnerable in Rural India. It was very thought-provoking as we identified multiple groups that emerged out to be vulnerable and we also discussed the way forward — considering aspects when working with the marginalized population.
As a part of this workshop, we also created a zine. We were split into breakout rooms and our team (we called ourselves the stay closers!) came up with this cool work as a part of the workshop discussion:
My sleep schedule during CHI week was not really great. But it was all worth it. Both the keynote speeches were really impressive and called for immediate solutions to some of the critical design challenges. Inspiring work by Dr. Chieko Asakawa and her journey as she came across “Buttons” was touching and it made me aware of the significance of making inclusive technologies. Equity and Justice were also discussed in the second keynote speech by Dr. Ruha Benjamin. These provided important insights and drew attention towards addressing important research questions around equity in design.
I had pre-planned my calendar and reading list and that helped me attend all the paper sessions that I wanted to. The experience with the Delegate Connect portal was decent for me ( I was clearly lucky here!).
Yet another centre of attraction was the Networking Rooms. There were multiple video chat windows facilitated. They were named after the cities in Japan. It was the go-to place after the paper sessions and had “room” for talking more about the exciting research works of the authors. People from sponsoring industries like Bloomberg, Google, Microsoft were also present here. While interacting with them, I got to know about the industry demands and the skills required for a UX Professional.
Unfortunately, one of the courses on Statistics for HCI was cancelled. But the other two were very well structured and interactive. It provided a room for hands-on learning.
The other workshop that I attended was on Decolonizing HCI across Borders. The paper submissions were divided according to multiple themes like Gender and Entrepreneurship, Data, Governance, etc. Here, I got the bandwidth to discuss the challenges that I faced while working on the project on Women Entrepreneurs and get early feedback on the same.
There were industry invited talks. It was great to know about the research culture at Microsoft. And the exciting projects going on at Monash University. These provided great value on how research projects work out in the industry and academia.
Alt.CHI sessions were really intriguing and the roundtable discussion that followed saw a very healthy discussion on the paper topics. That added a lot of perspective to the ways we see and conduct research in general. I could connect to the discussions going around sensitive topics.
Besides this, there were social gatherings at virtual platforms. EduCHI and HCI for South Asia arranged social gatherings. These were open accessible sessions to share the research work and also safe spaces to discuss and share about the ongoing pandemic. These were conducted on Zoom and Kumospace. I was new to the Kumospace portal and found it really impressive…
If there was one thing, that remained constant in all the conference sessions — it was the untiring efforts put in by each Student Volunteer. Special shout out to them for making it a smooth experience for all of us. I wish to become an SV sometime in future. The idea of being an integral part of the conference and helping it make a huge success is so exciting.
All in all, it was a great experience for me. Lots of learnings and takeaways! I made new friends, got to interact with people passionate about research. It was truly the highlight of this month. And I am looking forward to contributing to the CHI community in future.
So, this was my experience at CHI’21. If it was your first CHI too and would like to share your experience, feel free to write to me at <nckd.joshi@gmail.com>. Thanks for stopping by and reading it.
Signing Off,
Kartik Joshi (kabiir)
