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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QUADRANT II
Developed but
isolated themes
“Ivory Tower”
QUADRANT III
Emerging or
declining themes
“Chaos/Unstructured”
QUADRANT I
Motor themes
“Mainstream”
QUADRANT IV
Basic and
transversal themes
“Bandwagon”
Figure 1. Strategic diagram showing the various stages of a research theme.