IHC 2008

The Brazilian Symposium of Human Factors on Computer Systems (IHC) is the main forum of the Brazilian Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) community. This symposium brings together researchers, industry professionals, educators and students of various HCI-related disciplines, such as Computer Science, Psychology, Ergonomics and Graphic Design, among others.

We celebrate in 2008 the 10th anniversary of HCI events in Brazil. This has been a time for great progress: an entire generation of researchers has been produced spreading HCI knowledge countrywide. Usability and accessibility subjects have been integrated into governmental technological policies; industry is now fully aware of the importance of user-centered design practices. The event itself has solidified and expanded, giving birth to the Latin-American Conference in Human-Computer Interaction (CLIHC). Brazilian research has been acknowledged internationally and one of the major international conferences, the IFIP TC13 INTERACT has been hosted in Brazil in 2007.

During these past 10 years, we have reflected about the nature of Interaction. We managed to understand our users. We mastered the WWW and created solutions with emerging interaction technologies. Today, the relationship between humans and computers is an established and irrevocable fact. Interaction is now part of daily life: we are already living within ubiquitous computing; we are working on overcoming access barriers and on inclusion of disadvantaged populations. We are promoting society integration and disseminating the digital culture. Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) are intensely used by Brazilian population.

This scenario poses a challenge for researchers �?? thinking of users no more as individuals but as interconnected communities. Even the concept of interaction quality has to be broadened to encompass the diversity of interactive systems usage, like in entertainment, security in information exchange and broadcast, participation in social and democratic processes as well as applications in critical areas like health and environment.

Human Computer Interaction impregnates modern life. HCI today is structural for systems design. HCI is already permanent in human life. Each day, HCI is more and more natural.

Within the challenges to be addressed in the next decade, as proposed by the Brazilian Society for Computing �?? SBC - there are also challenges for the HCI community. We invite you to discuss HCI for today and for the next 10 years. In particular we welcome contributions related to aging and User eXperience (UX) which discusses the many roles played by interactive systems at the different phases of human life, including users who learned to use the computer before learning to read, users who employ computer in the daily life as a mean to gain productivity, for entertainment and/or to socialize, and those seniors users who are learning the new technologies to improve their quality of life. This CfP was obtained from WikiCFP