Interactions - March/April 2015

Motor themes are the heart and soul of a discipline, its main topics or schools of thought. Surprisingly, we found that, unlike other disciplines, CHI has consistently lacked motor themes. Our analysis suggests that researchers who publish at the CHI conference do not systematically get behind a small number of topics to advance them sufficiently into the mainstream. Rather, our analysis showed that most research themes at CHI remain at the Bandwagon or Chaos quadrants. We simply roll from topic to topic, year after year, without developing any of them substantially.

The discussion of our paper remained moderate and stuck to presenting the facts and figures of our analysis. Here, I wish to provide a critical view of our findings and argue that for experienced HCI researchers, these findings are not surprising at all: In fact, they clearly demonstrate some of the skewed ways in which our community values research.

The first point I wish to make is
that a lack of motor themes should
be a very worrying prospect for a
scientific community. Therefore, HCI
The theme eventually matures its
internal cohesion and moves to the
Mainstream quadrant, where the
motor themes of a community lie.

Finally, a theme will lose its centrality in relation to the field and move to the Ivory Tower quadrant, subsequently dying away by returning to the Chaos quadrant.

Our analysis suggests that researchers
who publish at the CHI conference
do not systematically get behind a small
number of topics to advance
them sufficiently into the mainstream.

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