Last week, Tom and I attended CHI in Portland. Aside from the paper presentations I mentioned last week, CHI also features Interactive Exhibits, Panels, a debate and some special interest group meetings. This format is pretty much consistent with the previous CHIs. Worth noting, and somewhat tangentially related to our comic this week, is that CHI2006 will actually be divided into communities, one of which is Education. The others include Design, Reseearch, Usability, Engineering and Management. This new format should give more focus in each area to perhaps facilitate more interesting discussions and submissions. We shall see.

Tomorrow, I’ll be writing about one of the highlights of CHI, Bill Buxton’s Lincoln Laboratories panel. In the meantime, go check out http://www.chi2006.org. There was a lot of discussion on some mailing lists about the vlaue of CHI to practitioners and why people did and did not go to the conference. I’d love to hear one, some or all of:

- why you did or did not go to CHI2005
- whether you think CHI2006’s format changes will help improve the conference for you personally
- if you attended CHI2005, what the hi and lo-lights of the conference were for you

Stay tuned for more coverage from us.

At CHI I had a chance to interview Michel Waisvisz, this year’s closing plenary speaker. He is based in Amsterdam and has spent his life creating novel electronic instruments as well as expressive electronic augmentations to traditional insutrments.

During the plenary, he performed an improvised electronic piece after explaining his “hands” interface. This interface uses a few “traditional” controller inputs like buttons in combination with more novel pressure sensors, ultrasonic rangers, accelerometers, resampling microphone, and mercury switches. These speak through MIDI to the Lisa-X sound manipulation engine.

Active Threads

» Does Communication Everywhere Improve Communication? (19)

» Mental Model Building: Step by Step (6)

» World's First HCI Rap: "We Got It" (142)

» Kicking the Llama (23)

» Unconferences are Overrated (14)

» The Usability of Urinals (17)

» Beginner's Guide to Moderating a Usability Study (12)