Alt-HCI 2012

Alt-HCI is a track of HCI 2012, the 26th Annual Conference of the Specialist HCI group of the BCS, to be held in Birmingham, UK 12-14 September 2012.  It is intended as a place to explore and discuss issues at the edge of the discipline.

This site is the open review and discussion site for the track, the range of interest and discussion will be used as part of the process of deciding which papers are accepted to present at the conference, but will stay live before and through the conference to allow ongoing discussion on what we hope are the ideas on the leading edge of the discipline.

So, please comment and discuss the papers here.

To help you, here is is the original call:

Does your work push the bounds of HCI? Do you find mentioning it amongst your colleagues sparks endless debate? Are you working with a group of users that are in some way extreme or exploring conceptions of technology that do not fit or standard models? Do you have a weird finding or observation you would like to share, but that does not seem to fit into traditional ways of talking about HCI? Are you simply revisiting and area that was once mainstream and is now out of fashion, or dismissed? Or reproducing an old result and finding it not quite as expected?

Perhaps you are investigating methods for inducing negative user experience, or for not getting things done (or is that Facebook?). Maybe you would like to argue for the importance of Taylorism within HCI, or explore user interfaces for the neonate. We are looking for papers and topics that make us think again about HCI, that spark discussion, that would get highly divergent grades in standard review process.

Human-Computer Interaction is a broad discipline, and the British HCI conference has always been more accepting of the range of this than some venues. However, we still need to be challenged, to see new things, or see the old in new ways.