About A Photo History of SIGCHI

Ben Shneiderman, University of Maryland
Human-Computer Interaction Lab, August 2001

The photos you see on this web site capture the emergence of the discipline of human-computer interaction and the leadership role of the Association for Computing Machinery's (ACM) Special Interest Group on Computer Human Interaction (SIGCHI). The vibrant personality of the serious researchers, competent practitioners, and energetic students shines through the photos, letting you see their enthusiasm and eagerness.

Since the famed Gaithersburg, MD conference in 1982, that helped spawn SIGCHI, I have been photographing my colleagues at conferences, workshops, and seminars. Attendees were often suspicious of my motives, but my goals were simple: to record our emerging discipline, capture the process of communicating ideas, and to remember the mature heroes and promising students.

I've had the pleasure of presenting my photos as slide shows at conference closing ceremonies, in published conference reports, and sometimes for historical reviews. Now this photo history goes from my personal record to being a public archive for the SIGCHI community, for historians, and for interested surfers who just want to see the people who are working hard to create better interfaces and happier user experiences.

The Photo History of SIGCHI grew out of our PhotoFinder project that developed a personal photo library tool to organize, annotate, and search thousands of photos.

It had always been a dream to take my SIGCHI photo archives, stored in chornologically organized paper folders, and scan them for electronic access. Fortunately, Marilyn Mantei (SIGCHI Chair) and the SIGCHI Executive Council supported this vision with a grant to scan the thousands of photos during the summer of 2000. Intel provided major funding, and additional support was provided by IBM, Microsoft, and Ricoh for PhotoFinder software development and then the development of the kiosk version.

The three photo libraries in this Photo History of SIGCHI are:

• CHI 1982-2000: 28 collections of my photos from the CHI conferences and CHI-sponsored conferences
• CHI 2001: 21 collections of photos taken by different conference attendees using their digital cameras or ones we lent
• Other HCI events: 40 collections of my photos from non-CHI events, but including many of the same people

I supplied thousands of annotations and some captions, but these were dramatically expanded by the hundreds of users of our seven kiosks at the CHI 2001 Conference.

Restructuring our software to support public access at the CHI 2001 Conference pushed our team to make many innovations and improvements. Restructuring again to support a web interface required still further design and implementation. Graduate student Hyunmo Kang has been the key developer during the past three years, and Bill Kules has worked during the past year to coordinate and manage the project. Thoughtful comments were made by many members of the University of Maryland Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory, especially Catherine Plaisant and Anne Rose. Undergraduate and graduate student projects (whose reports are accessible from the PhotoFinder web page) made important contributions, especially Richesh Ruchir, who programmed the Java Server Pages for the web version.