CHI '89 INTERACTIVE POSTER SESSION PAPERS AND ABSTRACTS

The Interactive poster sessions at the annual CHI conferences are one of the outlets that CHI provides for researchers to present work that, for a variety of reasons, does not fit the constraints of the technical paper sessions. The poster format offers presenters a forum in which to meet and discuss their work with others interested in the same topic. It is particularly suited for work in the formative stages and for descriptions of systems with novel interface features, but a wide variety of research results have been presented in this format. Presenters find the opportunity to interact with their audience to be a very useful and rewarding aspect of the session. They invariably come away with a list of conference attendees interested in closely related topics.This year the poster arrangements were somewhat different from previous CHIs, in keeping with the many innovative aspects of this "wild and woolly Texas" CHI. Forty-seven poster presentations were scattered among four of the lobby levels of the University of Texas Performing Arts Center, where the conference plenary sessions were held. Conference attendees got to view the posters and interact with the presenters before the opening plenary on Monday night, May 1, during the Mexican Fiesta later that evening, and during the Western Barbecue after the Tuesday plenaries. Traffic in the poster area was particularly heavy during the initial showing, but presenters and attendees had opportunities for more extended interactions during the two receptions.The posters were grouped into nine topic areas: analysis/evaluation, analytic models, design of user interfaces, empirical studies of programmers, information retrieval, I/O technologies, learning social impacts of computers, and user interface tools. Presenters came from Canada, England, Germany, and Japan, as well as the United States. Slightly more than half of the posters (25) came from universities, with seven of those being participants in the doctoral consortium which was held in conjunction with the conference.Abstracts submitted for the poster session were reviewed by a panel of judges which included: James Alexander, US West; Nathaniel Borenstein, CMU; Wayne Gray, NYNEX; John Karat, IBM; Jean McKendree, MCC; and Robert Vallone, Ashton-Tate.Abstracts and papers printed here represent the first of those available for publication. More will follow in subsequent issues of the SIGCHI Bulletin.