Title: Conference: ACM CHI 2001

While some of you were attending The ACCU's Spring Conference 2001 in Oxford, I was flying over Greenland and Canada to Seattle, USA, where I attended the CHI 2001 conference (pronounced "kai") at the expense of the Cambridge University Computer Laboratory, St John's college and EPSRC. I was there to present my first paper, which was about the web access gateway on ACCU's site, but I stayed for the rest of the conference and had a very interesting time.

Flying is an experience that deserves an article in itself, not to mention the cultural differences associated with inner-city life in the Western United States. The conference itself was a three-day affair, with three more days of workshops and tutorials prior to that. It was held in the Washington State Convention and Trade Centre, a spacious glass building with six floors.

I decided to spend some time familiarising myself with the building before the conference started. (When you're partially sighted, the main thing that hinders you from exploring a building is that officials keep stopping you and asking what you're looking for!) Having learned the building and the surrounding area proved most valuable as I often found myself directing others throughout the conference.

On registering I received a fairly large bag containing the proceedings and the extended abstracts (two large volumes each of over 600 pages with print of varying quality), a ring-bound programme, a video of the video posters (mercifully in PAL format), a coupon for a CD-ROM, an identity badge, leaflets about local attractions, various advertisements for other conferences and so forth, a pile of "post-it"-like notes, and an evaluation survey. Also available for the taking was an issue of "Communications of the ACM" and an issue of "Interactions". The first thing I did was to look for my own paper in the proceedings, but alas it was not there - it was a workshop "position paper", and those things don't count. I was a disappointed, since I had been led to believe that I had made my first publication in academia (ACCU unfortunately doesn't count), but the workshop organiser said that perhaps something could be arranged.

The workshop ("Universal Design: Towards Universal Access in the Information Society") was attended by 15 people, all participants, and there was a strong sense of community. Most items went over time but we agreed that it was worth it for the interesting discussions after each presentation. I had come equipped to record interesting talks but learned that this was not allowed in the convention centre. After the all-day workshop we all went to dinner, and during that day I got to know the organiser and some of the participants informally.

A colleague had recommended that, since I was new, I ask every single person a question; I tried to do this as much as possible (I had read all of their papers in advance from the workshop's web site), and I tried to continue this policy into the main part of the conference, where the audiences were somewhat larger. Someone jokingly asked if I was running for the "greatest number of awkward questions from the floor" award, and during one of the sessions on the last day, someone privately hinted that people might be about to get annoyed. I therefore stopped asking questions for that session, but one of the organisers was disappointed because he had been trying to take a photograph of me asking a question for the conference archives (he got one eventually). A few people from the audience introduced themselves to me informally and said that they had appreciated my questions.

During the whole conference, informal chats often proved to be most interesting. I would walk up to a random person in the foyer, introduce myself, and ask who they were and what they were doing. The first person I did this to happened to be the head of Netscape's usability team. On one occasion I complained about Windows to a lady and I noticed she was writing it all down; she turned out to be a newly-employed usability designer at Microsoft. I met prominent academics, promising students and commercial researchers from around the world, and a number of them wanted to stay in touch and gave me their business cards (perhaps I should have printed a few cards of my own). I was even offered an internship at IBM China.

The opening plenary was by Bill Gates (Redmond is very near Seattle). It was in a large hall with six large projector screens, some showing slides and others showing the speaker. After a long introduction of loud modern music, animations and Microsoft advertisements, there was a short blast of Lloyd-Webber on the organ and the audience cheered as a very excited Julie Jacko introduced the conference's theme of "anyone, anywhere" and gave some background on Gates and Microsoft. Gates' talk was primarily about the directions that Microsoft's research is taking, with demonstrations of products such as Microsoft Reader (supposed to replace books), the Tablet PC, and a notification system that knows about all your mobile devices. Unfortunately I didn't get the opportunity to ask an awkward question, but Gates was surprisingly open about Microsoft's failures as well as its successes in the user interface (although he never mentioned alternatives such as Linux). After the talk, the displays showed pictures of Seattle along with an orchestral medley before another blast of the organ and the modern music.

There was a large hall called "The Commons" that included many blank notice boards, with pens and paper supplied. These were later filled with researchers' posters, messages for individuals, jobs available and wanted, and commercial exhibitions with promotional giveaways from pens to disposable cameras. There were times when the authors of posters were available to talk about them, and the ones I spoke to were very nice, although there was not time to meet all of them. Most of the posters were presenting the results of user experiments, such as the importance of visual avatars in online help (as in the Office paper clip), the (in)effectiveness of banner ads, and the screen layouts that sighted users expect from Web pages. It was also possible to use the notice boards to organise sessions of your own, called "informal SIGs" (special-interest groups) or "networking lunches"; I tried to arrange an informal SIG for the last day, but nobody turned up. Additionally, there was an "Internet Room" with some Web browsers (although of course it was oversubscribed at times), and a World map that allowed participants to mark their home with a pin. The pins were mostly in Europe and the coastal areas of the United States, with some in the Far East and a few scattered around the rest of the world.

The amount of research going on in this field is overwhelming, and there were a ridiculous number of talks, demonstrations, discussions and other sessions happening at the same time, with no way to get to all of them. I went to the newcomer's session, where I learned that the ACM (Association of Computing Machinery) is the world's largest computer society and that SIGCHI organises ten other conferences besides CHI (computer-human interaction). There were some 3,000 attendees at this conference alone. I went up to the speaker afterwards and told him about ACCU, and he said he'd provide some information on CHI 2002 for us.

Some of the more interesting projects I saw included a hand-held device for remote tactile communications (pressure on one device results in the same point of the other device vibrating), a robot user interface (you position a robot your end and the remote one moves to mimic that position), a location-aware PDA that allows public and private notes to be made about your current location, a project that allows a Web-enabled mobile phone (or, by extension, a special-needs Web browser) to be used as a general-purpose remote control for appliances, a text-based interface for blind people to draw diagrams, a verbal language for simple database queries, a set of headphones that allows the user to select which conversations to hear, an interactive recipe book that uses electric field sensors instead of a keyboard, an office picture display where parts of the picture symbolise the status of various things to monitor, another display that did a similar thing using pictures of fish swimming in an aquarium, a device that allows a group to manipulate a model by moving a set of pucks around on a desktop that has the model projected down onto it, a virtual reality artistic modelling system, an electronic whiteboard that allows the use of customisable hand gestures to select which tools to use, a Web browsing assistant that uses a theory called "information scent" to guess which link is most likely to be needed next and makes it more prominent, and a system that plays a video of the Vienna Philharmonic and follows the user's conducting.

Perhaps the best talk was the closing plenary by Greg Vanderheiden, one of the key figures in accessibility. He gave examples where design for accessibility has led to advantages for everyone (especially in awkward environments or with temporary impediments) and to market-leading products that many people don't realise were initially intended to address a disability (typewriter, carbon paper, subtitles etc); he also described a hypothetical futuristic PDA called "Window to the World" that can be used as an assistive device for various disabilities but would primarily be used by others. He believes that the word "all" in "design for all" is not a code-word for "people with disabilities", and that accessible products need to be market-leading in the general population because specialist products are more difficult to obtain, although multiple interfaces are needed because a "lowest common denominator" approach is too restrictive when all disabilities are accounted for. Arguing for why designers should be concerned, Vanderheiden showed a group of human outlines and encouraged members of the audience to each choose a figure for themselves. He then advanced the age clock and more and more of the figures were marked as disabled. He even suggested that universal design maybe the next "big thing" in user interfaces, like the GUI was (which incidentally caused some blind computer experts to lose their jobs).

Vanderheiden's talk was followed by a video advertising the next CHI conference, including a (probably faked) invitation from the mayor of Minneapolis where it is to be held. The video tried to sell the conference on the basis of Minneapolis' nightlife rather than on any merit of the conference itself, and was unlikely to appeal to all of the cultures represented in the audience.

The high profile of certain commercial companies in the conference could lead cynics to speculate who was making a profit out of it. Everyone had to pay a registration fee even if they were presenting a paper; add to this the commercial sponsorship and there could be millions. However, the registration fee was low when compared with the necessary travel and accommodation; I imagine that almost everyone there was being funded by their company or organisation rather than themselves. Since conferences like these have become the de facto "place to be", anyone interested in user interfaces could do a lot worse than to attend one, if only for the opportunities to make new contacts. It was a good example of the usefulness of conferences in general.