Proceedings of the 4th Nordic conference on Human-computer interaction: changing roles

NordiCHI is the main forum for human-computer interaction research in the Nordic countries. It is a biannual conference, and the three first conferences were held in Stockholm (2000), Arhus (2002) and Tampere (2004), respectively. This year's conference is held in Oslo and is hosted by the Norwegian Computing Society (NCS). It is a joint effort ("dugnad"), joining together a large portion of the Norwegian HCI community in academia, research and industry. Each fall for the last 8 years NCS has arranged a two-day conference on usability, user experience and documentation called Yggdrasil. NordiCHI incorporates this year's Yggdrasil conference. The most visible result of this is that NordiCHI 2006 has defined Industrial Experience Reports as a new contribution category.The main theme for this year's conference is "Changing roles". We currently see a reshaping of almost every aspect of society, which is caused by the forces of globalization and innovative uses of personal technologies in the networked society. Do we need to change our roles as developers, researchers and designers? How can we maintain focus on the user in this rapidly changing environment? Will the role of HCI change? The broad call for participation elicited excellent response in the HCI community, and we are happy to provide a high-quality technical program that combines the best of the Nordic tradition with emerging trends in interaction techniques and new approaches to study human-computer interaction. The technical program combines four different categories of submissions: Long papers, short papers, industrial experience reports and interactive events (demonstrations). We received 134 long papers, 123 short papers and 16 industrial experience reports. An international committee, totalling 98 reviewers, helped in the selection process. Each submission received at least 3 reviews. In the end we accepted 37 long papers, 28 short papers (18 for plenum presentation and 10 posters) and 8 industrial experience reports. The proceeding also includes documentation of interactive events. The acceptance rate for long papers was 28% and 23% for short papers. The submitted long papers represent 21 countries and the accepted papers came from 11 countries (about half of these from countries outside the Nordic region), and distributed as follows:Austria: 2Canada: 2Denmark: 3Finland: 3Germany: 2Iceland: 1Italy: 2Norway: 2Sweden: 8UK: 8USA: 4