CHI Meet-Up: From ARPPID to RAPPID
Bridging Academic Research and Professional Practice in Interaction Design
This CHI Meet-Up brings together the community formerly known as ARPPID (Academic Research and Professional Practice in Interaction Design)—now evolving into RAPPID.
Originally launched through the ARPPID 2025 Working Conference, the network was created to address a long-standing challenge in HCI: the gap between academic research and professional practice in interaction design. As the community expands in scope and ambition, RAPPID reflects this evolution—retaining ARPPID’s core mission while opening up new directions for collaboration and impact.
This meet-up will serve as a sample of the kind of conversations and community that RAPPID in Groningen (June 2026) aims to foster.
Why this meet-up matters
HCI has long been shaped by tensions between theory-driven research and the realities of professional design practice. Research has shown that HCI remains epistemologically unsettled, that practitioners apply HCI concepts in highly situated ways, and that structural mismatches between research and development continue to limit real-world impact. These challenges are increasingly urgent in the context of AI, ethics, sustainability, and practice-based innovation.
Meet-Up Goals
- Consolidation
Strengthen and expand the community established through ARPPID 2025 by reconnecting participants and welcoming new members from across CHI. - Collaboration
Explore opportunities for sustained collaboration across academia, industry, education, and policy, focusing on interaction design challenges such as ethics, AI, sustainability, and practice-led innovation. - Community Building
Provide a forum for academics, practitioners, and students seeking alternatives to purely AI- or theory-driven HCI, emphasizing the integration of research with lived professional practice.
Who should attend?
This meet-up is for CHI attendees who care about connecting research with professional interaction design practice, value practice-based and practice-led research, and are interested in shaping a research–practice community that places human and societal needs at its core.