My CHI paper on design (paper)

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This past week I submitted a paper to the largest conference in my area, CHI ("The ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems is the premier international conference of Human-Computer Interaction"). Since the conference is peer reviewed (double-blind), I can not divulge the title of the paper nor indeed anything about the contents, but, I can say that the paper (for once) has little to do with "sustainability" and all the more to do with "design".

Even though I can't say anything about the contents of the paper, I can say a few things about my co-authors and how the paper came about. It all started when I invited Staffan Björk (professor of interaction design at Chalmers University of Technology and Gothenburg University) to give a guest lecture in my course last year. I thought the lecture was fantastically interesting and we decided to meet up and discuss/evaluate the possibility of writing a spin-off paper together during the NordiCHI conference at the end of October. At some point we also decided to invite Maria Håkansson (assistant professor at the department of Applied IT at Chalmers University of Technology) into the process, not the least because we at that point thought the paper would be more about sustainability than what it later turned out to be.

We all met up at NordiCHI and outlined the main ideas of the paper and have later met (conference call over Skype) every or every second month between November and June, hashing out and discussing the main ideas as well as reading articles and relevant books in-between our meetings.

The work went smoothly during the spring, but we hit a snag at the beginning of September, when it was time to convert all the conversations we had had into running text and into a paper. It turned out we were all very busy and there was a distinct chance the paper would not be written. So I stepped up and accepted the responsibility of being the first author and make sure it got done.

We originally aimed for writing a full (10-page) paper. We wrote a few pages and then ran into a wall, so we decided to instead aim for a minimal (4-page) paper. That short paper started to swell in the process of writing it and the paper in the end became something in-between a short paper and a full paper. I'm quite happy about the result, but haven't so much as glanced at the paper since it was submitted earlier this week. For now have high hopes about the chances of getting the paper accepted. I would prefer not to travel to a North American CHI conference for the second time in a row (the conference is held in Montréal during the second half of April) and my co-author Staffan has already made a preliminary promise to go there and present the paper should it get accepted. But for now we just lean back and wait, we will get to know whether the paper is accepted or rejected on December 11.
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