CHI 2026 in Barcelona was part of my original sabbatical plan. CHI is the premier conference spanning all areas of human-computer interaction, and Barcelona is a direct flight from the UK.

Read more: Reflections on CHI 2026

It’s been ten years since I last attended CHI 2016 in San Jose. Why so long? I had a baby in 2017, and there was a pandemic in 2020 which significantly reduced for most of us. Beyond those temporal factors, there are structural factors too. CHI is an expensive conference, and travel is expensive since the location rotates between North America, Europe, and Asia. CHI is typically scheduled for April or May, a difficult time to get away from Whitman: April is the “month of 1000 nights” chock full of final presentations and performances, including the Whitman Undergraduate Conference, running up to final exams and Commencement in May. It’s hard to justify attending if I have nothing to present at the conference, but classes to teach at home.

I also left CHI 2016 with a feeling of being left out. I’ve never had a CHI posse: I predate the DUB Center at the University of Washington, and I left UW to work at liberal arts colleges where I was the only HCI researcher – up to my last few years at Whitman where I was joined by William Bares and then Jordan Wirfs-Brock. I feel a much greater sense of belonging at SIGCSE and at smaller, more focused HCI conferences. This CHI, I invited a non-CHI friend to enjoy Barcelona with me, which has alleviated the self-imposed pressure to socialize outside of program hours.

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CHI was on my sabbatical bucket list as an opportunity to discover current research and reconnect with friends and collaborators from my past. On the former point, watch for an upcoming blog post on “Four CHI 2026 papers I wish I wrote.” On the latter, I reconnected (if briefly) with lots of people.

• Jonathan Lazar stayed at the same hotel as me; I ran into him over and over again. It turns out he is on sabbatical too. He’s lived my dream of being a lifelong student, currently pursuing a professional masters’ degree in AI Ethics and Society at Cambridge in addition to holding a visiting fellowship, so he’ll be visiting regularly.
• Because of Jonathan, I met Ben Shneiderman again, one of the founding fathers of HCI. Although I’m much more established in my career now, it was just as strange as my previous two encounters.
• Tawanna Dillahunt also stayed in the same hotel, and once I literally ran into her (almost)! I admired Tawanna’s work on sustainability when I was working in that area as an Assistant Professor at Grinnell.
• I got to see UW CSE classmate Jon Froehlich receive a SIGCHI Social Impact award. He gave a terrific talk, including a mention of his early collaboration with Tawanna.
• I was delighted to see Bran Knowles, with whom I co-authored an IWC paper on sustainability and persuasive technology during my early days at Whitman.
• I caught up with Evan Peck, my liberal arts friend and CRA-E colleague who made the move to UC Boulder just a few years ago.
• I reconnected with Jennifer Rode, to whom I have owed a visit since arriving in the UK last summer. This Easter term it might actually happen.
• I saw Kate Glazko in passing at least twice, but didn’t actually get to talk to her. We met at the last CRA Summit at Snowbird.
• Of course, I saw Ivy Turk, who recently completed their PhD Cambridge Cybercrime Center, at a number of sessions related to interests we share in common.
• I did not see Amy Ko, although I know from her Facebook posts that she was there. Hi, Amy!
• f I forgot to list you here, I apologize. Shoot me a DM and I’ll add you to the list!

Of course, I also met a number of new people – including many at Cambridge or with connections to Cambridge. As it often goes, HCI researchers are scattered across many departments, so it’s easier to meet at a conference than at home. I met at least five HCI researchers in the Cambridge Engineering department, having met none before CHI!

Although I didn’t manage to meet either of them during the conference, I greatly appreciate the efforts of Dorian Peters and Katie Seaborn to bring the Cambridge HCI community together. I’m looking forward to the Cambridge post-CHI lunch this Thursday.

In many regards, I wish CHI had fallen earlier in my sabbatical year – or that I had been able to attend the conference in Yokohama last year or in Honolulu the year before when I was writing my sabbatical proposal – not only to explore possible research directions, but to make connections at Cambridge before I arrived. Lesson learned!

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Some thoughts on the conference format and content:

I was skeptical about the new workshop format: two afternoon sessions Monday through Thursday, rather than two full days before the conference. Writing a position paper seemed like disproportionate effort for a 3-hour workshop, and in fact I missed the deadlines. It was a mostly-pleasant surprise to find so many workshops labeled “open door,” and I ended up attending workshops on Monday and Thursday.

I had also intended to participate in a workshop about online abuse on Tuesday, and even submitted a short bio and statement of interest in advance. But I failed to mark the conference program ahead of time, forgot what day it was on, and didn’t see it among all the other options for Tuesday afternoon, so I only realized on Thursday that I had missed it. When Ivy told me this workshop was far more productive than the other one they had attended (which required a position paper), I felt real FOMO. C’est la vie!

Packing all the accepted papers into nine, 90-minute sessions was a lot. With so many parallel sessions, the online conference program was overwhelmingly large and cognitively challenging to navigate (see above). Facing the usual conference center problem of having parallel sessions scheduled in rooms of starkly different sizes, there were plenty of seats in some rooms and lines of people waiting to get into others. Each session had seven, 11-minute presentations. It went by fast and there was not much time for questions. I was actually a fan of the Town Hall proposal to allocate presentation slots only to best papers and honorable mentions, leaving the rest of the papers to poster presentations, exactly because a poster presentation gives more opportunity for questions and discussion. (I made a point of visiting the work-in-progress sessions during the breaks.)

At the same time, the structure of the paper sessions afforded serendipity. I enjoyed most of the presentations I saw and left the conference with 77 (!) papers on my reading list. It reminded me of my grad school colleague and mentor A.J. Brush, and specifically her mission as a new post-doc to read all the award papers from that year’s CHI proceedings.

While I sought out sessions on gender, education, cybercrime, and persuasive technology – all themes at play in my current research interests – values and Value Sensitive Design emerged as a theme highlighted in papers across many sessions. So did participation and Participatory Design. Perhaps it’s just that the program committee took a topical rather than methods-oriented approach to organizing sessions, but it seems like VSD has become woven into the fabric of HCI methodology in a way that it was not ten or twenty years ago. I think my graduate advisor Batya Friedman would appreciate that.

I noticed that among the posters, the ones that called out to me most used participatory methods – especially cultural probes, a method I had a lot of fun with as a new Participatory Design practitioner at Grinnell. I also surprised myself with my interest in design for and with children – but this is perhaps only natural considering my role as parent of a school-age child, a new role since my last CHI. It makes me curious whether an interest in children and childhood could become part of my research, or if it will only remain a point where my professional interests touch my personal interests.

On that note, stay tuned for more reflections on CHI content and possible research directions.