Meeting designers where they are: using industry events as a research venue for HCI and design methods development

There is much work in the CHI community about the ‘industry-academia divide’, and how to bridge it. One key crossover between HCI/UX scientists and practitioners is the development and use of tools and methods—boundary objects between academia and practice. Among other forms of collaboration, there is an underdeveloped opportunity for academics to make use of industry events (conferences, meetups, design jams) as a research venue in the context of tool and method development. This paper describes three cases from work in academia-industry engagement over the last decade, in which workshops or experiments have been run at industry events as a way of trialling and developing tools directly with practitioners. We discuss advantages of this approach and extract key insights and practical implications, highlighting how the CHI community might use this method more widely, gathering relevant research outcomes while contributing to knowledge exchange between academia and practice.