Cultures as Catalysts: Nurturing HCI Communities Across Regions

Abstract

This Meet-Up explores how regional cultural values can act as a catalyst for the growth and sustainability of HCI communities and research agendas worldwide. Organized by the chairs of SIGCHI Regional Committees (Asia CHI, Latin America CHI, Mediterranean CHI), with support from the SIGCHI VP at Large, the session positions Regional Committees as bridges that attract new participants, mentor and nurture local ecosystems, and connect bottom-up initiatives to the global CHI network. Through short framings, small-group dialogues, and collective synthesis, we will surface culture-aware practices for attraction, mentoring and opportunities for culturally grounded community-building and collaboration. The session aims to produce a concise set of reusable outputs (1) better attract and welcome newcomers and underrepresented groups; (2) nurture local communities via context-sensitive programming; and (3) translate regional insights into globally visible collaborations within SIGCHI.

Citation

Maristella Matera, Zhicong Lu, Gustavo Lopez, Houda Elmimouni, and Susan Dray. 2026. Cultures as Catalysts: Nurturing HCI Communities Across Regions. 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 797, 1–2. https://doi.org/10.1145/3772363.3778799