Given that research of different kinds is interwoven, united by a common goal like H.C.I., to ‘strengthen cooperation’ could be a buzz-phrase easily uttered in a warm-hearted proposal. Nevertheless, a homogeneous understanding of the H.C.I. community as a whole diminishes the critical force which advocates an alternative path to preserve humanity from the narrative that’s presently attention-driven, i.e. A.I. narrative. The topography of H.C.I.—conducted through in-person activities (amongst local communities and in conferences)—negotiates a landscape with participants who decide and question the distance between one research and another.
The topography uses clay to create architecture that represents works of H.C.I. research. After shaping their own, the participants place pieces against each other to form a view of relationships. Unlikely it is to neighbour two studies which only share dissonance; surprising it is to find oneself in accord with a study bearing a novel title. To claim a corner in the landscape takes courage, though the field of H.C.I. is yet to be fully mapped: the harmony of human-computer is yet to be found; but it should not be achieved by the easy-to-use curse with the reductive tendency that casts human intelligence merely as that of a prompter or supervisor, rather than a creative mind.
ref.
Tor-Salve Dalsgaard and Katerina Cerna. 2026. The Topography of Human-Computer Interaction. In Proceedings of the Extended Abstracts of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA '26). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 866, 1–4. https://doi.org/10.1145/3772363.3799112