CHI 2008 The SAP Design Guild has published a long and quite critical report on the recent CHI conference by Gerd Waloszek, a user experience professional at the business software company SAP.

The SAP Design Guild is a site maintained by SAP User Experience, where SAP AG offers its public user interface design resources.

“Unlike my colleague Janaki Kumar, who also attended the conference (see her report), I felt that the CHI’s motto “Art. Science. Balance” – although well suited to the city of Florence – had been somewhat artificially imposed on the conference. All in all, I did not find that this motto reflected the central theme of the conference. The “Renaissance panel” (see below) appeared to be a somewhat weak justification for the motto, even though it was very interesting and deserved much more attention. Despite the fact that the CHI conference had such a universal motto and was held in Europe, I had the impression that it was more a U.S.-centric than ever, even though some well-known faces, such as Jakob Nielsen, Don Norman, and Ben Shneiderman, were missing from the conference.”

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