Case Studies provide researchers and practitioners a venue to present empirical inquiries that investigate particular phenomena within real-world context. Each Case Study should involve in-depth, longitudinal examination of a single instance or event: a case. We expect that doing this provides a sharpened understanding of why the instance happened as it did, and what might become important to look at more extensively in future research. Case studies are submitted to one or more of the communities and are judged according to criteria appropriate to each community. We look forward to receiving your submissions and seeing you at CHI 2008.

Desney S. Tan, Microsoft Research
Contact me: chi2008-tp@acm.org

Case Studies are examples of HCI practice that are based on real world experience, described and generalized in a way to be of interest and instructive to other members of the community.

Potential types of Case Studies include, but are not limited to:

Case Study topics overlap with papers and CHI notes, but are reviewed under different criteria. A Case Study is a description of a specific instance with information about how it might be generalized, but, in contrast to a paper or note, the case study focuses on the success of the approach in a particular context, showing the idiosyncrasies of the context, and leaves it to the listener to determine whether the approach is applicable to his or her environment. Of course, what makes a particular case study compelling is that it is potentially relevant to a wide range of situations, but we do not always expect the author to rigorously establish the applicability outside the original situation.

Authors should submit the following:

Part 1: Extended Abstract
The primary submission material consists of an extended abstract in the Extended Abstracts format. Design Case Studies can either be submitted as 16 page long case studies or 4 page short sketches. See the Design Communities page for more information. All other Case Studies should be maximum of 8 pages long.

The extended abstract should describe the experience, focusing on the lessons you want readers to take away from the presentation. Your extended abstract must stand alone. Readers must be able to understand the Case Study with only this material.

Part 2: Supplementary Material
You may augment the extended abstract with additional material that supports your thesis. The submission of any supporting material should take into account the demands of the reviewing process and neither be excessive in length nor require close scrutiny. Typical supporting materials will be documents (pictures, etc) or interactive media (e.g., flash prototypes) that have been produced for other purposes, which may help the reviewing committee to understand why this work is of interest to the CHI community. Our intent is to make submission of Case Studies lightweight by allowing practitioners to leverage material created during the activity, without having to completely rewrite it for publication.

Please provide a manifest, in PDF, of the auxiliary documents in your submission. The manifest should explain the nature and purpose of each of the submitted items; if the report is relevant to multiple communities, include that information in your manifest. Then combine your files into a single zipped document.

Authors will submit Case Studies to any of the following communities: Design, Education, Engineering, Management, and Usability, and will be judged on criteria specific to the appropriate primary community. However, authors can specify multiple secondary communities, who will also review the Case Study.

Your files should submitted by 3 Oct 2007 (5:00 PM PST) to the PCS submission system.

Case Studies are reviewed by the appropriate Community Co-Chairs, using a panel selected by them. Each submission will be reviewed by at least 3 reviewers. Authors will be provided with the reviews of their submission after the decision is announced.

Case Studies offer narratives of the challenges of an activity, the processes used, and the results achieved (good or bad), including the impact on all stakeholders, such as the user community, the sponsoring organization, and technology providers. Accepted submissions will be chosen on the merit and contribution of the report, not only on the quality of the outcome that it describes. This means that a valuable lesson learned from a poor outcome is just as acceptable as a valuable lesson learned from a good result.

Specifically, the review criteria will be the extent to which the case study report:

Confidentiality of submissions is maintained during the review process. All rejected submissions will be kept confidential in perpetuity. The supporting material will be kept confidential, though it is the expectation of the committee that much of it will be communicated in the presentation. The extended abstract should contain no information or materials that are proprietary at publication time.

Authors will be notified of acceptance or rejection on 3 Dec 2007, or shortly after. Contact authors of accepted Papers will receive instructions on how to prepare and submit the camera ready version of their Papers. These will be due on 11th Jan 2008 (5:00pm PDT).

Participants will present their report in a scheduled session. The committee will assign reports to talk slots depending on the length of the submission. Please see Standard Technical Support for information about the kind of technical and A/V support that will be provided by the conference.

Accepted Papers will be distributed in the CHI Extended Abstracts. They will be placed in the ACM Digital Library, where they will remain accessible to thousands of researchers and practitioners worldwide. Selected supporting material may also be archived on the Conference DVD and the ACM Digital Library.