Socially responsible interaction

Why now?

Human beings evolved for many millenia; during most of that time, our major social contacts were within small, tightly knit groups who shared a common language culture and physical context.

In the last historical eyeblink, we rather suddenly find ourselves part of a global community. We have very different cultures, languages, perspectives, and physical contexts. Moreover, as a species we face the possibility of bringing about our own extinction if we cannot solve some exceedingly challenging problems. Our individual brainpower has not increased significantly in the last 100,000 years. Computing and communication technologies offer some potential, however, to increase greatly our collective intelligence and creativity. With the proper attention to both the human and technological aspects of HCI, we have the possibility to make a crucial difference in a variety of issues. For example, it is now possible as never before to design technology to support universal usability. We desperately need new thinking for our political, social, economic and ecological problems. We can now build tools to support creativity, discovery and innovation. Recently, we have begun to understand more about how to use technology to help integrate how we work as teams, groups, and communities. Medical informatics and personal medical devices offer new opportunities to reduce skyrocketing health care costs in the developed world and offer new hope to eradicate disease in developing countries. We invite your contributions to making HCI socially responsible.

Special-theme conference topics

Additional conference topics

Contributions on the following general HCI-related topics, but with a focus on the conference theme, are especially encouraged (in alphabetical order):

Support

Platinum
Gold
      
Bronze

Organization