People and Computers XVIII - Design for Life

Book excerpt: The eighteenth annual British HCI Conference chose as its theme Design for Life. 'Life' has many facets, from work (of course, or should we say inevitably!) to travel, fun and other forms of leisure. We selected 23 full papers out of 63 submitted, which covered our interaction with computer systems in a variety of types of life situation — including games, tourism and certain types of work — and also covered a variety of stages in our lives, from the young to the elderly. These papers were complemented by others that described more traditional aspects of research in the field of human-computer interaction. In putting together the programme we followed a three-stage process. First each paper was reviewed by at least three reviewers. Then a member of the committee conducted a meta-review. Finally, all sets of reviews were considered by the technical chairs who assembled a programme that was submitted to, and approved by, the full committee. This process was greatly assisted by the use of the Precision Conference Solutions web-based submission system. Even more important, of course, were the volunteer reviewers themselves. In recognition, this year we have made an award for the best reviewer as well as one for the best paper.