Conference Reports: Katherine Song at CHI 2022
We are thrilled to support our students sharing their research across at the premiere conferences in their field. Katherine Song shares her participation at ACM CHI.
The ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems is one of the major international conferences for the field of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). CHI 2022 was held in New Orleans, LA and was the first opportunity since 2019 for HCI researchers to gather together in person (though the conference was technically a "hybrid" format that also supported remote participation and attendance). I attended the conference from Saturday, April 30 to Wednesday, May 4 and also organized a remote conference workshop that took place on April 21.
The remote workshop was centered around the theme of "unmaking" and drew 15 participants from fabrication, design theory, economics, education, and critical HCI. Unmaking is a budding idea in HCI, and the workshop was a great opportunity for like-minded researchers to gather and define our community, values, and priorities. In New Orleans at the conference, I presented my paper, "Towards Decomposable Interactive Systems: Design of a Backyard-Degradable Wireless Heating Interface." The paper describes an interactive packaging system that we developed that is lightweight, reusable, and degradable in your backyard in its entirety. The paper presentation drew a lot of interest from researchers working in biomaterials, digital fabrication, and critical design. During the rest of my time in New Orleans, I had the opportunity to have extensive conversations with many of these researchers. It was wonderful to get to meet so many people whose work I admire and also get to exchange research ideas, share ways of thinking, and discuss potential future collaborations. I also attended several other paper presentations, and getting to interact with authors and ask them questions afterwards gave me a much deeper understanding and appreciation of the work they presented/wrote about.