CHI South India, plus CHI Local SIG Activities at CHI 2001
July 2001 Local SIGs column
This issue's column includes a short description of CHI South India, followed by a few words about the many activities at CHI 2001 in Seattle WA (USA) during April that involved CHI Local SIGs (as well as several HCI organizations independent of SIGCHI).
CHI South India
Pradeep Henry, Chair - CHI South India
India's software industry is huge. Hundreds of India-based software companies do software development/maintenance projects for various organizations in the US, Europe, and countries all over the world. And most of the largest multinational software giants have a development center in India.
One of the accepted facts is that Indian programmers are good. But, would users say that the best interfaces come from India? No center of learning in India (except Indian Institute of Technology - Bombay, to my knowledge) offers any significant courses in HCI or usability engineering. Most of the technically-savvy programmers are not aware of principles of good interface design. Further, myths are rampant. For example, most people still think that good user interface design is about good visual design.
When so many user interfaces are coded by Indian programmers for the whole world to use, it is important to make sure that they are designed from the users' viewpoint. That's a critical need.
So, when Richard Anderson (CHI Advisory Board) asked me if I would like to play leadership role in running a SIGCHI chapter in India, I told myself "Here's an opportunity to do my bit toward fulfilling that critical need" and I immediately responded "yes." I quickly formed a small team comprising my colleague Antony Rajasekaran as Secretary and Ebenezer Abraham as Treasurer. We launched CHI South India on January 4, 2001. And CHI South India became the first ACM SIGCHI chapter to be chartered by ACM in India.
Then we faced a bunch of questions. How would we spread awareness of user-centered design? Who were the people who would like to listen to us? How would we reach out?
We knew that it would be a bad idea to start by asking people to pay and become members. We first wanted people to see what usability was all about and to see the capabilities of the chapter. So we thought out an idea: organize a national-level conference on usability. We called it Easy2001. And marked it up for March 23, 2001 -- just a couple of months away!
Easy2001 was held as planned and was -- considering the newness of the topic in the country -- a big success! More info about Easy2001 is available elsewhere in this issue and also at www.chi-SouthIndia.org.
CHI Local SIG Activities at CHI 2001
Richard Anderson, Editor & Local SIGs Chair
Representatives of chartered and prospective CHI Local SIGs, and of several HCI organizations independent of SIGCHI, were busy during CHI 2001 attending to issues of importance to their organizations.
At the previous 4 CHI conferences, I led a popular full-day workshop for CHI Local SIG leaders. However, this year, the nature of the needs of CHI Local SIGs and of SIGCHI's relationship with other HCI organizations argued for several narrowly-focused and shorter meetings. The foci of some of those meetings included:
- CHI Local SIG operational issues;
- the possible formation of a European federation of HCI organizations;
- student chapters and student subgroups of chapters;
- SIGCHI's tutorials-to-go program;
- being affiliated with SIGCHI without being a Local SIG.
My thanks to the many organizations that participated, and to Robert Burns and Tom Hewett and several members of the SIGCHI Extended Executive Committee for their critical participation.
CHI Local SIG representatives were also often to be found in the area of the CHI Local SIGs booth throughout the conference. As usual, the booth was a source of lots of information about CHI Local SIGs as well as the place at which conference attendees picked up conference badge ribbons sporting the name of their CHI Local SIG.
The amount of interest expressed in CHI Local SIGs that exist or don't yet exist suggests that the growth in the number of CHI Local SIGs around the world and in the size and number of activities of existing CHI Local SIGs is likely to continue for some time.
