ISS

We are very happy to welcome you to the 2017 ACM International Conference on Interactive Surfaces and Spaces, held from 17-20 October 2017 in Brighton, UK. As the 12th event in an annual series starting in 2006, ACM ISS (formerly known as ACM ITS) is the premier venue for research addressing the design, development and use of new and emerging digital surface, interactive spaces and multi-surface technologies. Interactive Surfaces and Spaces increasingly pervade our everyday life, appearing in various sizes, shapes, and application contexts, offering a rich variety of ways to interact.

The London to Brighton corridor is home to more than 2800 companies in the digital area (e.g. animation, video) and 78000 businesses in Engineering, IT and creativity. This exciting professional environment combined with Brighton's great infrastructures and international accessibility will ensure that ISS attendees have an inspiring and enjoyable time at the conference.

Sponsored by ACM SIGCHI and generously supported by Microsoft, NUITEQ, Saarland Informatics Campus, Sony CSL, Synaptics, and Ultrahaptics, the conference brings together researchers and innovators from a variety of backgrounds from all over the world. As ever, our main goal has been to provide an engaging and high quality program. The program features a strong selection of papers devoted both to pure research and to concrete applications. The conference received 119 paper submissions, of which 32 were selected, leading to an acceptance rate of 26.9%. Each submission underwent a rigorous peer review. They were assessed by a program committee consisting of 40 senior experts and by 170 external reviewers. The accepted papers reflect the variety of topics and perspectives that comprise the ISS community, ranging from multi-touch surfaces and interactive 3D spaces, to interactive textiles and novel interaction modalities. The conference includes the largest demo session ever presented at the ISS/ITS conference series, comprising 23 interactive demonstrations from ISS and 6 additional demos from the co-located SUI conference. The program further comprised 2 plenary panel sessions and 18 posters that present late-breaking work. Finally, we have accepted 4 workshops and tutorials, which allow for focused work to advance cutting-edge topics.

We are especially pleased to have two exciting keynote speakers. Karon MacLean, Professor of Computer Science and head of University of British Columbia's Designing for People interdisciplinary research cluster, will give the opening keynote. Her talk focuses on the many challenges involved in taking haptic actuation from research to a real-world design process. The closing keynote will be given by Geraldine Fitzpatrick, ACM Distinguished Scientist and head of the Institute of Design and Assessment of Technology at TU Vienna. Her talk will explore how playing at the intersection of social and computing sciences can inform the design of interactive surfaces and spaces in everyday life.

The 10-Year Impact Award recognizes influential research published at our previous conferences. This year the award goes to Eva Hornecker for her paper entitled "I don't understand it either, but it is cool -- Visitor Interactions with a Multi-Touch Table in a Museum". Her contribution to TABLETOP 2008, the 3rd IEEE International Workshop on Horizontal Interactive Human Computer Systems, describes findings from a field study of an interactive tabletop in a museum of natural history. Back then, visitors struggled to learn how to interact with the exhibit, and their engagement with content was shallow. This paper is one of the first in the community to study the difficulty of designing large interactive surfaces for public settings and outlines challenges and design conflicts. The insights that Hornecker offers on public behaviour, confusions, and hesitations with large interactive surfaces still provide considerable value for designers and researchers of modern public displays.

They are also relevant for many other types of deployed technologies, especially given the need for simplistic interactions that enable "walk-up-and-use" design approaches. The paper also provides an excellent example of an "in-the-wild" study, and analysis and presentation of observed behaviours from an in-the-wild deployment of an interactive surface that -- from a methodology perspective -- is still highly relevant today. Therefore, ten years later the strong and continuing impact of the paper is clearly seen in the many and ongoing citations to the paper by other researchers within and beyond the HCI field.