Proceedings of the 21st British CHI Group Annual Conference on HCI 2007: People and Computers XXI: HCI...but not as we know it - Volume 1
Venue: British Computer Society Conference on Human-Computer Interaction (2007)

At first sight the two themes of this year's People and Computers volumes seem to send conflicting messages. On the one hand, "Happy 21st" suggests that British HCI as a discipline has much to celebrate, having grown from its inception at the 1985 conference at the University of East Anglia, through infancy (where it made quite a lot of noise) and its terrible teens (struggling for substantive and methodological independence from its parents), and maturing into an autonomous discipline, ready to make its own way in the world. On the other hand, "HCI...but not as we know it", darkly hints that British HCI may not be the same creature that saw the light 21 years ago; that it has, perhaps, been led astray or become possessed by an alien force. Rather than the negative connation of alien possession, however, the "HCI...but not as we know it" theme might better be taken to reflect how British HCI has not merely matured into adulthood but is now an evolving life-form that is adapting to meet the many emerging research challenges within the contemporary landscape of interaction design. Central amongst the changing contexts of current HCI research are the realms of mobile, virtual and everyday interaction that are far removed from the focus on static, desktop-based interaction that prevailed at the inaugural conference. The theme of that conference was "Designing the Interface", and the resulting proceedings volume, edited by Peter Johnson and Stephen Cook [3], was dominated by papers focusing on formalising methods, models and guidelines for the design and evaluation of usable interfaces in workplace and office situations, with the main concern being the support for effective task completion by adult professional computer users. Of course, the 1985 conference came before the Internet as we know it. There did exist a form of Internet, but interaction was limited to text-based commands and simple messages, and there was only a small cabal of dedicated users based in research establishments around the world. And there were no multimedia systems or mobile phones. So it is hardly surprising that the 23 full papers selected for this year's conference are so different in their sheer breadth of focus and concern from those published in the 1985 proceedings. People and Computers XXI fully reflects the changing terrain of contemporary HCI, with researchers examining contexts as diverse as the social world of Blogs, the creative world of Digital Live Art, and the virtual world of Second Life&reg;. Moreover, although there are papers that examine adult users in work-based contexts, these papers are equally balanced by those that address more diverse user groups (e.g., children, families, artists, and performers) in contexts far outside the workplace (e.g., in the street, at home, in school, on the stage, or within the urban transport system). We have clustered our papers within this volume into eight sections that capture effectively the evolving nature of HCI research.