By Joice Tang, HCDE PhD student
August 2023
In July, I had the opportunity to attend the Designing Interactive Systems (DIS) conference with the generous support of HCDE’s PhD Student Conference Travel Assistance. Although I wasn’t attending to present my research, I had several reasons to attend DIS: 1) I had received free registration to the conference as a Student Volunteer for a papers subcommittee, 2) I was recruiting for a study centering HCI and other computing or design adjacent researchers, and 3) I wanted to participate as an in-person Student Volunteer to get to know more of my academic peers. I felt very lucky to have had the opportunity to attend without presenting any work, because I feel like the relationships and friendships that I made at DIS will be incredibly important to the future of my research career – this experience has opened up new collaboration opportunities and new ideas, and it has also expanded the network of academics in this field who know who I am. I was also able to further my research at the conference, because I ended up scheduling several of my research interviews at the conference. My very unique experience of recruiting and conducting interviews at DIS gave me methodological insight that I will surely use in research projects in the future.
My primary justification for attending was my recruitment effort for my current research project, which centers cultures of relationality in community-based participatory research (CBPR) in computing adjacent fields. As such, I hoped to primarily recruit participants relationally, which meant that I wanted to have some sort of pre-established connection with the participants, either through my own interactions with them or through connections in my network. Attending DIS as a Student Volunteer allowed me to successfully follow this rule. My role as a Student Volunteer allowed me to meet other Student Volunteers who either worked with CBPR methods and/or knew others who did, and the nature of assisting with presentation sessions allowed me to seek out audience members and presenters who I was interested in talking to. Attending DIS allowed me to approach other attendees about my research before or after sessions, and even allowed me to conduct five of the seventeen interviews that I conducted for this study at the conference. Academics tend to be very geographically dispersed, and conducting interviews at the conference allowed me to sit down face-to-face with some of my participants instead of conducting interviews on video conferencing platforms. Being able to conduct in-person interviews at DIS taught me how in-person interviews are more amenable to building relationships and rapport with participants, in addition to deepening and strengthening the quality of the data that gets collected. Overall, I can confidently say that my experience at DIS has changed my research career in an incredibly positive way.
Give to support HCDE student travel
The Mary B. Coney Endowed Fund, named in honor of Emeritus Professor Mary Coney, supports HCDE students by funding costs associated with travel to conferences and international workshops. Your support of this fund enriches the HCDE student experience and enhances HCDE's influence in the field.