By Blair Subbaraman, HCDE PhD student

CHI 2024 was my first time attending CHI. It was a qualitatively different experience than the HCI conferences I’ve attended in the past (e.g., DIS, UIST, SCF)–there were so many people! Whereas these smaller conferences only have a couple of tracks running in parallel, there was a nice opportunity to attend talks outside of my primary research area; there are only so many digital fabrication talks in the program. Above all, it was great to meet so many researchers in such a short time. I was able to meet several collaborators, professors, and students who I’ve always wanted to connect with.

I was able to present my late breaking work about interactive control and documentation for digital fabrication systems. This was my first time doing a poster session as I’ve only done formal talks for previous papers. While there is less public visibility for posters, I found the session to be lively and productive. I was able to chat at length about the work with interested attendees. The most surprisingly difficult (and fun) element of the session was in tuning the way I speak about the project depending on who came by the poster. Designers were interested in different aspects of the research than systems builders, for example. Altogether it was a great opportunity to solicit a wide range of feedback and reactions to early stage work.