By Xiaoyi Xue, HCDE master's student
Yokohama CHI 2025 was my first time at CHI. My teammate and I presented our poster: common::ground: A Gamified Toolkit for Facilitating Meaningful Interactive Sessions in it. This was a school project developed from HCDE 518. We were more than happy to see that Human-Centered methodology, specifically facilitator-centered design, interviews, and focus groups, was recognized by academia. Being able to share our works with other researchers around the world was a learning experience.
The most valuable thing about attending CHI was the people I met. In CHI 2025, I was able to catch up with my old friends whom I met in IEEE VR 2024 and IEEE ISMAR 2025. We were so happy to meet each other, especially in this era where uncertainty and conflicts were daily topics in everyone’s mind. Being able to gather and cheer for research excitement at CHI shows that we can build the world a better place with intellectual contributions in communication and collaboration. Also, more than meeting old friends, I met some new friends, which made me wonder, “Oh, research can also be this way.” I met one researcher working in a non-academic research organization named Collective Intelligence in one of the paper sessions. He was in
CHI to help researchers turn their findings into practical applications for real impacts. Talking with him made me realize that there are many alternatives to leverage your research. I am now allocating part of my research time to investigating how to enlarge my impact in other aspects of research. Moreover, I met one researcher who is also exploring fandom communities in East Asia. She was in CHI to advocate the importance of conducting research of fandom communities using HCI methods. Being able to connect with her not only means I have a new collaborator but also gives me a lot of courage in my research. I am going to conduct research with her in understanding the mechanism in fandom communities and developing new forms of diagrams in depicting them. What’s more, I was able to connect with professors who are looking for PhD students. There was this professor from Hongkong who came to our poster and talked to us about his lab and PhD offering. Connecting with him helps me to know more about the PhD opportunities by talking to him directly. In my future research, I would love to continue this journey of connecting with other people for idea collision. “Art happens not in isolation, but in community”. For me, it was through CHi that this sentence was re-actualized. I want to be open to other people, be curious of areas that I do not know, and be willing to go into the unknown.
Attending international conferences like CHI is not only beneficial but also a privilege for early researchers like me. I still remember when I was in my gap year, I needed to pay registration fees, travel expenses and accommodation for IEEE VR 2024 and IEEE CoG 2024 all by myself. I am really grateful to receive the help from HCDE, which not only helped me in a financial way but also showed our programme encouraged early stage researchers like me in their adventure. Especially, thanks to Dr. Cynthia Atman for her help and encouragement along the way. She was a professor not only for a simple course or discipline, but a model for what it means to be a human-centered researcher. Along with the same spirit from HCDE, I would love to help other early researchers in the future, as a way to give back :D
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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.