Technical Program Introduction

Common Ground is the theme of CHI 96. For the technical program this means creating a common base of understanding between all CHI participants. Practitioners and researchers need to appreciate each other's work and motives. Students of HCI and educators should be able to speak a common language. CHI participants from different cultures and continents should understand one another's concerns for a humane way to design and use information technology. Users and designers should share a common concern for usability.

We are very proud of our CHI 96 plenary speakers, Herb Clark, a psycholinguist at Stanford University, and Betty Edwards, Director of the Center for Educational Applications of Brain Hemisphere Research, California State University, Long Beach, California. We also have a new event this year, Invited Contributions, which come from outside the traditional HCI disciplines. In the spirit of reaching out to find common ground with new disciplines, we have contributions from cognitive neuroscience, library science, and modern dance. Please check out the dance installation in the Commons, ongoing throughout the conference! We also have a report from the CHIkids' experience with creative childcare.

Another CHI 96 innovation is a Retrospective on Preconference Events. Workshops, the Doctoral Consortium and the Research Symposium will report highlights of their events on Thursday morning.

This year we made available mentoring help to those submittors not familiar with CHI traditions. We had some successes with accepted papers! We hope the mentoring program will become a regular part of CHI.

We are working toward making CHI a global conference. We have international coordinators from four continents, a highly international conference committee and review committees. The accepted submissions have more international representation than ever before.

In the Technical Program, there are thirteen different types of activities (in addition to the Plenary talks and the Invited Contributions). Full papers are published in the Proceedings. The Conference Companion contains Short Papers, Interactive Posters, Social Action Posters, Workshops, SIGs, Demos, Videos, Design Briefings, Panels, Organization Overviews, Research Symposium and the Doctoral Consortium.

We hope you have a wonderful CHI 96 experience!

Bonnie A. Nardi
Gerrit C. van der Veer
Technical Program Co-Chairs

chi96-webmaster@acm.org / 96-01-02