This message on CHI 2026 is reposted from the CHI Steering Committee’s blog.

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The ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) CHI conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems is the leading international conference on Human-Computer Interaction. CHI 2026 will take soon take place in Barcelona from the 13th to the 17th of April.

The CHI Steering Committee would like to thank all of the volunteers who have been working, for many years on this conference, to bring our global community together in Europe this April. This conference series and each particular conference takes many years of work and planning. Work is now underway for CHI 2027, CHI 2028, CHI 2029 and CHI 2030 and as a result of the scale of CHI, We book venues a long way out based on Venue Capacity Projections, and our ongoing challenge is to Find the right venue with this growth velocity. 
 

We book venues a long way out

CHI has sold out two years running, which is a function of our emerging growth acceleration. But it’s also forced us to figure out where to go from here. The venue you experience at CHI this year was booked years ago. That’s just the reality of operating at CHI conference scale. The spaces we need require booking years into the future. This requires us to make decisions based on our best read of what things will look like years from now. 

CHI has sold out before, such as in Paris in 2013 and the Steering Committee adapted our planning. Covid-19 happened and we stepped back from our venue in Hawaii 2020, with a promise to return. CHI 2021 pivoted to an online-only conference, and we stepped back from our venue in Yokohama, with another promise to return. Each year the General Chairs and organising committees for CHI step into a physical location booked many years ago, along with a changing set of global circumstances. For all their hard work and grace, we thank them.

Venue Capacity Projections

When our site selection teams go looking for venues, they work from historical delegate numbers: how attendance has grown, where people travel from, what the program demands. It’s not a perfect science, and when growth accelerates the way it has, the projections don’t always keep up. We’re feeding everything we learn back into that process so we get better at it.

Over the years we have many opportunities for our community to get updates and contribute input, for example:

• In June 2025 we reported and reflected on the CHI 2025 conference survey 
• In November of 2024 we posted a CHI Steering Committee, Site Selection Consultation
• In 2021 we shared details on What is the Site Selection Process for CHI Conferences? 

Finding the right venue with this growth velocity is hard

CHI is a big, complex conference with a program structure that puts heavy demands on a venue: parallel tracks, workshops, demos, the works. The venues that can  handle all of that, at a registration fee that doesn’t price out our community, are few and far between. And there are fewer of them every year. We have hit a ceiling and we all need to reimagine future CHI conferences to accommodate these constraints.

We want to hear from you!

You can write or email the Chair of the Steering Committee at: 

Or please come meet us at CHI 2026 

1. Reflections on Format Changes at CHI
   Thu, 16 Apr | 4:30 PM – 4:30 PM
2. SIGCHI Townhall
   Wed, 15 Apr | 12:45 PM – 2:15 PM
3. Upcoming changes to the CHI full paper peer review process: Community feedback session
   Wed, 15 Apr | 2:15 PM – 3:45 PM

Aaron Quigley on behalf of the CHI Steering Committee