For inquiries, please contact the alt.britchi Chairs.

Important Dates

alt.britchi: What HCI Can’t Do

Human–Computer Interaction has matured into a field with well-established expectations around contribution, evaluation, and presentation. While this has allegedly strengthened the rigour and impact of HCI research, it has also limited the space for ideas and forms of knowledge that are exploratory, unconventional, or difficult to situate within existing formats.

In the spirit of alt.CHI, we call for the inspired contributions of our peers: dreamt futures, strange rants, beautiful poems, protests, cries of help, artifacts, impossible papers, data treasure troves, adversarial actions. In this track, we invite submissions that position themselves across, outside, between, or against mainstream HCI. We wonder: what is it that HCI can’t do? The form is entirely up to the authors, but we expect them to be provocative and at least comprehensively articulated. While the main conference’s theme is “Digital Bridges – exploring the digital connections and social impact that technology can make.” Conversely, we wonder: what can’t it do? Is it burning bridges or creating digital borders? We are interested in understanding relations of power, historical trajectories, and the specificities of place.

We will particularly welcome submissions with explicit reflections on HCI with its institutions, venues, and norms, which are entangled with longer histories of power, including those shaped by Britain’s colonial past and present. These legacies continue to inform whose knowledge is centred, which methods are legitimised, and how “impact”, “rigour”, and “novelty” are defined.

Scope and Topics

We invite contributions that challenge assumptions, surface overlooked perspectives, or open up new directions for HCI. Submissions may include (but are not limited to):

  • Provocations and position pieces that question and reject dominant paradigms in HCI
  • Speculative and critical design work, including design fictions, fabulations, and alternative imaginaries
  • Unfinished or early-stage ideas that resist conventional forms of evaluation
  • Reflections on failure, tension, or contradiction in research and practice
  • Uncomfortable or unexpected findings that complicate established narratives
  • Interdisciplinary work that sits between HCI and other domains
  • Experimental formats or voices, including essays, visual work, and hybrid forms

We encourage contributions that engage with questions of:

  • Power – who designs, who benefits, and who is excluded
  • History – how past decisions, infrastructures, and ideologies shape present and future technologies
  • Place – how technologies are experienced and negotiated in specific local and cultural contexts

This may include work that surfaces overlooked or uncomfortable histories, interrogates dominant narratives in HCI, or explores alternative futures grounded in diverse perspectives and lived experience.

Submission Details

  • We invite submissions in the following formats:
  • Short papers (2–5 pages)
  • Pictorials
  • Provocations or essays
  • Films
  • Design artefacts or visual submissions (with accompanying text)
  • Experimental or alternative formats (please contact the track chairs if unsure)

Submissions should clearly articulate:

  • the core idea or contribution
  • how it challenges, extends, or complicates HCI
  • why it sits outside the boundaries of conventional HCI venues

Submissions should follow the BritCHI formatting guidelines and submission process as outlined on the main conference website.

Multiple paper submissions and submitting across multiple tracks: If you are planning to be an author on multiple submissions, please carefully read information below regarding publication fees before submitting your work.

Submission Process

Formatting: Authors should submit their paper in PDF format. Please adhere to the Electronic Workshops in Computing paper format.

General instructions for writing manuscripts: https://www.bcs.org/media/4864/ewic-paper-preparation.pdf

Word Templates
Windows: https://www.bcs.org/media/4866/ewic-paper-template.dot
Mac OSX: https://www.bcs.org/media/4867/ewic-paper-template-mac.dot

LaTeX
Instructions: https://www.bcs.org/media/4868/ewic-latex-template.pdf
Class file: https://www.bcs.org/media/itwpirx0/ewic-latexcls.zip
Main file: https://www.bcs.org/media/4870/ewic-latex.tex

Submission Process

Submissions are via EasyChair: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=britchi26

Review Criteria

Submissions will not be evaluated according to conventional criteria (e.g. completeness of evaluation or methodological rigour in a traditional sense). Instead, we are looking for work that is:

  • Provocative – does it challenge assumptions or open up debate, does it make trouble?
  • Original – does it offer a perspective, idea, or approach that feels new or underexplored, or does it revive an idea as old as time but in a beautiful manner?
  • Generative – does it create space for others to engage with it?
  • Situated – does it engage with the social, political, historical, or cultural contexts in which technologies are designed and used?
  • Well-articulated – is the idea communicated clearly and effectively, or so incomprehensibly it is wonderful? We particularly value contributions that make visible what HCI often leaves implicit: the power structures, historical conditions, and situated realities that shape technological design and experience.

Submissions to alt.britchi will be reviewed by a curated panel of reviewers selected for their experience in critical, speculative, and interdisciplinary HCI.

Reviews will focus on the extent to which submissions are provocative, generative, and relevant to the aims of the track, rather than on conventional CHI criteria.

Final acceptance decisions will be made by the track chairs, taking into account reviewer feedback and with the aim of assembling a balanced, engaging, and thought-provoking (or action-provoking!) programme.

Publication

Conference papers will be published online with open access, indexed in SCOPUS and Web of Science – Conference Proceedings Citation Index (CPCI) and referenced in CrossRef with a DOI identifier. Papers will be indexed in the ACM Digital Library. To make alternative forms of submission compatible with the library, we will work with the authors to create a companion publication and organise other material in the submission as part of the library entry.

Publication fees: the substantial costs associated with the processing and digital archival of manuscripts, the following registration policy applies:

  • One Registration per Paper: At least one author must register at the conference for each accepted paper.

  • Multiple Papers by a Single Author: If an author has multiple accepted papers and is the only author with a conference registration, a Mandatory Publication Fee of £100 will be charged for each additional paper beyond the first.

  • Co-authored Papers: If a different co-author registers for each subsequent paper, the additional publication fee will be waived.

Presentation Format

As the format of presentation is heavily dependent on what the authors are suggesting, we will try to adapt and make space in the official program for alt.britchi

Accepted contributions will be presented in whatever form suits them best. The track will be positioned as a “between the cracks” space within BritCHI, creating room for ideas that are exploratory, unconventional, or still in formation. That means even the presentations may happen as such. Alternatively, papers may fit better into a more traditional presentation format, and where this is the case, can be included in the papers schedule.

The chairs will be in contact with the accepted authors to aid in organising the format of the presentation, but we also recommend the authors fill in a suggestion at time of submission.