One of the highlights of this year was traveling to Edinburgh to attend ACM DIS 2017. I presented some of my recent work “Leave Them 4 Dead”. I definitely enjoyed the experience of presenting my work. I also met amazing people, said hi to old friends, and got to walk down the street that inspired Harry Potter’s Diagon ally.

A special facet of this experience was the shift in mindset that comes with this specialized subgroup of ACM sigCHI. I really enjoyed being reminded of the schools of thought it is easy to fall into at CHI and CHIPlay. The DIS conference focuses on user input and design, giving me an opportunity to really think about the user, not just the designer catering to the user. This theme was further amplified in my attendance of Designing for the Arab world as part of the ArabHCI intitative.