Directors Post
Along other members from Design Informatics and the Lab I headed to Hamburg for ACM SIGCHI 2023 at the end of April. The sheer size of CHI meant finding the papers, panels and sessions you wanted to attend can be a significant job in itself! There were around 20 parallel sessions running from 9-6 each day, with evening showcase exhibitions, job fairs and early morning chapter meet-ups. It was a great opportunity to catch up with some familiar faces after a few years of hybrid/online CHI. I attended some interesting sessions on ‘Platforms and Algorithms’, ‘Data Practices, Permissions and Consent’, ‘Sustainability and HCI’, ‘(Un)Ethical Design’ and that was just day 1! It was noteworthy there was a lot more interest in issues at the intersection of law, ethics and regulation, which I was encouraged by. I also created a wider list of papers that I found particularly interesting at the conference (although I have yet to work through reading even a fraction of them yet!) There was also a rather cool exhibition of old desktop machines from a local computing museum I got some shots of.
