CHI Topic Selection

CHI accepts almost every topic that touches people and computing, so "is this in scope?" is rarely the real question. The decisions that actually shape the outcome are: which contribution type is this paper, and which subcommittee should read it. Both are declared at submission time in PCS, and both are strategy, not paperwork — CHI 2026 rejected roughly three quarters of 6,730 completed submissions, and a large share of early rejections trace to papers pitched at the wrong reviewer community inside CHI itself.

Start with the human, not the system

Ask: who changes what they do because this paper exists? A designer picks a different pattern, a researcher runs a study differently, a developer builds an interface differently, a policy team understands a user population differently. If no answer survives scrutiny, the project is an engineering result wearing an HCI costume, and reviewers will say exactly that. A system with no study can still be CHI-worthy — but only when the system itself embodies a claim about interaction that others can build on.