No Animals were Harmed in the Making of this Conference
By: Martin Tomitsch
Tags: Australia, Interaction Design, Hci, Conference, Covid 19

No Animals were Harmed in the Making of this Conference

It’s been on my mind for many years—bringing the Australian conference for computer-human interaction (OzCHI) to Sydney. The last time it was held in Sydney was 2014. To my knowledge it had never been hosted by the University of Sydney.

About 1.5 years ago, I finally felt that we had the right momentum to work towards hosting the 2020 edition of the conference. We had a great team of academics in the Design Lab working across human-computer interaction and interaction design, we had developed an excellent network of collaborations across Australia, and we had secured the recently opened conference venue, the Yallamundi Rooms, at the iconic Sydney Opera House.

Saved by design?

We were excited about hosting the first OzCHI conference of the new decade. The world was full of hope at the end of 2019, looking forward to welcoming the 20s with a good measure of optimism. The last decade had brought to bear many challenges—a financial crisis shattering industries and livelihoods, political shifts in countries across the globe, social unrests such as the London riots, and effects of climate change beginning to scratch more than the surface of our planet with Australia seeing one of its most devastating bushfires at the rear end of the decade.

But as the world was drawing the past decade to a close, things started to shift. A girl from Sweden made headlines and mobilised nations and communities to call for climate action. Likewise, the human-computer interaction and interaction design community started to call for more-than-human approaches.

Inspired by the hopeful glimpses that these initiatives offered, together with my colleague, Lian Loke, we took over at the helm as conference chairs for 2020 to ring in a new decade for the OzCHI series. Radiating hope and desire for positive change, we announced the theme for OzCHI 2020 as “Saved by Design?” to reflect on the broader environmental and ethical responsibility of human-computer interaction and interaction design.

Announcing the OzCHI 2020 conference theme during the closing session of OzCHI 2019 in Fremantle, WA.

The Covid-19 inflection point

Surely, we thought, the new decade would bring change. And change it brought. Many industries have seen an acceleration with progress unfolding within the period of 3 to 6 months that without the intervention of a tiny virus would have taken more likely in the scale of 5 to 10 years.

Our community has equally been affected and transformed by these changes. Many of us, who work as educators at tertiary institutions, had to transition to online teaching within a few weeks. Many experienced financial hardship or an impact on their health or the health of their loved ones.

We all had to shift our ways of working. Research studies that were already underway or scheduled to take place in 2020 were affected by the changes that new physical distancing rules imposed on human-centred research. In particular, many of our PhD researchers were faced with the question of how to design for people when you are not able to directly work with people.

As conference organisers, we had to ask ourselves how to plan a conference at a time full of uncertainty. We were one of the first conferences in our field to decide to go fully online. We made this decision early to give our contributing researchers, in particular those working on their PhDs (for whom the clock doesn’t stop because of a pandemic), a platform to continue to publish their work and to receive constructive feedback on their research.

In response to the new reality, we parked the theme “Saved by Design?” for a future conference and set out to design and deliver the first-ever fully virtual OzCHI conference—starting a new chapter for the conference series, which dates back to 1988, when the first seminar was held in Melbourne.

Thanks to the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society of Australia, the organisation behind OzCHI, we were able to keep the registration for attending OzCHI 2020 free for members and at AUD 30 for non-members. This was important to us, to enable everyone to participate in the conference, in particular those that have lost access to funding due to the pandemic. OzCHI is a not-for-profit event. Its main objective is to serve the community not to make money.

To manage workloads, we focused on the core tracks—papers, late-breaking works and a doctoral consortium. There were many tracks that we were not able to deliver because of the impact of Covid-19. For example, we decided to pause the OzCHI workshop program and, sadly, we were not able to run the OzCHI 24-hour Student Design Challenge, which was first held in conjunction with OzCHI in 2009. Equally, we had to defer our plans for an exhibition of case studies and demos (originally planned to be hosted at the Sydney Opera House).

Making a zero-carbon conference

One aspect that was important to us when we agreed to take on the organisation of OzCHI 2020 was to deliver an environmentally conscious conference.

We had started working on strategies to achieve this goal, from encouraging delegates travelling from Melbourne to Sydney to take the train over a plane, to conference badges made of up-cycled materials. Covid-19 certainly helped us to exceed this goal in ways that we could have never imagined a year ago.

Zero tons of carbon were spent on air travel in the making of OzCHI 2020. Zero trees were cut for printing conference booklets.

Original inspiration for conference badges made of up-cycled materials: Name tags used in the 10-year celebration for the Master of Interaction Design and Electronic Arts at the University of Sydney made from waste cut-offs.

Given the ethical and environmental issues associated with animal farming, we had always hoped to have vegetarian-only catering at OzCHI 2020. While some conferences (like TEI 2020) have managed to implement this, it’s clearly still a challenging concept for many attendees—as I quickly found out when I socialised the idea at OzCHI 2019. Making OzCHI 2020 a virtual conference meant we did not directly contribute to animal farming in any way. No animals harmed. ✅