At CHI2024, we brought a plan to the Town Hall for a major format change to CHI. We also discussed these changes and the motivation behind them in a blog post a few months ago. To summarize, we are planning to streamline the CHI conference experience by having a program only during the weekdays, and simplifying the formats for presentation. Papers will be delivered in the mornings, and then the afternoons will consist of interactive content divided into five categories. In total, there are six submission areas:
- Papers
- Panels
- Meet up
- Posters
- Workshops
- Interactive demos
There are several reasons to make this change. This change is the first of many iterations to optimize our conference experience as our community and scholarship grows. This format allows us a wider variety of convention centers and other meeting places that both enables us to have the conference in different locations and reduces costs. Avoiding weekend space rental also reduces costs. As we have documented in previous blog posts, CHI has had to make several accommodations to try and break even from a financial perspective, and post-pandemic has been running at a deficit. Many of the changes proposed are designed to assist in that mission of fiscal responsibility. Feedback from CHI participants often mentions the complexity of the program, due in particular to the large number of different tracks. Reducing the number of types of submissions and renaming them to be more self-explanatory is intended to simplify the program and make it easier for newcomers to understand.
We hope that the Meet Up format is considered as a very flexible format that will provide some of the value people have had in our traditional non-paper formats. For example, an organizer could propose a Meet Up that is topically organized around a specific Case-Study, a research tool, or even for networking purposes.
Regarding the Doctoral Consortium track (historically set up as an exclusive meeting between 10-20 PhD students and selected CHI mentors) we are opening this format up by creating a new Chair position that will program mentoring activities of interest to the hundreds of students that attend CHI annually—rather than focusing only on a small group of students. Moreover, SIGCHI sponsors ~25 specialized conferences annually and most of them have a doctoral consortium track that members of the community can apply for—the advantage of these doctoral consortia is that PhD students are able to benefit from mentors in their direct area of expertise, which has been harder to guarantee at CHI since it spans all areas of human-computer interaction.
We presented these changes at CHI2024, and there was an active discussion of the pros and cons of this format. One of the concerns was that having papers competing with many other tracks and activities of CHI. Our new proposal will mitigate this by scheduling papers in a different part of the day that does not compete with other activities. With this approach we will have a similar expected number of paper sessions, while ensuring that these do not conflict with other important aspects of the conference experience (e.g., panels, networking, workshops, etc). People also reflected on the positives of this newly streamlined format, and the flexibility this allowed for organizing the conference. Outside of the town hall, we’ve had online discussion sessions with many community members, and individual conversations with CHI contributors.
CHI is always planning a few years ahead when we are contracting for space. As such, we’re making final decisions for CHI2026 in Barcelona, and what exact space we’re contracting for in the conference center. With that in mind and considering the feedback we received, the steering committee is moving forward with a pilot of this new format for CHI2026.
Many of the specific organizational details will be turned over to the team running CHI2026 – with more details to appear on their page including CfPs. If you have questions or comments about these changes, please add a comment to this open document.
We understand any change to something as established and large as CHI is going to come with uncertainties and challenges. That being said, we see these changes as positive for both the intellectual and financial health of the conference. We are positive the community will work with us to manage these changes and make the format productive for future generations of CHI. In classic HCI tradition, this change reflects an iterative approach. We want to understand how this approach will fare with the community as they experience CHI 2026. This is not expected to be the final outcome, but the start of a new iteration.
We invite everyone in the global HCI community to take advantage of these changes and to use this opportunity to help reimagine the conference experience for both new and established members.