Pseudo-random thoughts

Warning: Abandon hope of finding a logical flow through the thoughts that follow. They are a collection of observations with little connection among them. As always, I welcome both e-mail about them and letters to the editor (for publication in a future issue). You know, there was something very nice about not just the size of CHI 2002, but the people who came. Early reports suggest that almost all attendees were "repeaters." My own subjective experience confirms that. Despite, or perhaps because of, the smaller number of people, I kept running into people I knew and people I wanted to meet. Perhaps the first-timers were kept away by economic or security concerns, but the CHI regulars seemed to come in force! After the opening plenary I had an interesting conversation with a student volunteer at an information booth. The question: is more transparency really the way to protect our privacy? Is it enough to be able to watch a stalker stalking me? What kinds of automated tools would be needed to help alert me (or the police) quickly if someone takes an "unhealthy inter-est" in my personal data? What kinds of counter-tools will the criminals develop? Do we reach a peaceful and safe fixed point, or an ever-escalating spy-vs.-spy scenario? Yes, I could have done without the first 20 minutes of the closing plenary (Stelarc's video's of "the body, suspended"). Certainly the local restaurants would have done better without such appetizing images. But they did have a point, I think. Perhaps the goal was to inoculate us from shock, so that when we started to see electrode-based remote control of "the body," we wouldn't say "ick" but rather "hey, that's cool!" It is fun, but very tiring, having CHI in your back yard. Everyone should try it, so I strongly encourage you all to move to Fort Lauderdale, Vienna, or Port-land. Or not. Thoughts about SIGCHI Is it a sign of strength, or of weakness, that SIGCHI is a large and successful organization? From the Computer Science perspective, would we be better off if only a few specialists would consider "joining" an HCI organization, but nobody could imagine not learning about humans and HCI? How many of you computer scientists out there want to join "SIG-Data-Structures" or "SIG-Debugging?" It has taken a while to crystallize, but I really like the idea of SIGCHI (and this field's) key strength being its …