Digital Experience Competition
Reimagine What It Means to Experience CHI
CHI has never been bigger or more diverse. Thousands of attendees arrive each year with radically different backgrounds, goals, and expectations. Some are first-timers finding their feet. Some are veterans looking to go deeper. Some are here for the hallway conversations; others for the papers; others for connections they haven’t made yet. The official programme app tells you what’s on. But what happens beyond that?
We’re inviting builders, designers, and researchers to create new experiences that respond to CHI’s scale and the richness of its community – apps and tools that open up the conference in ways we haven’t imagined yet.
What might that look like?
- A new way for people to find others who share their niche interests across a 4,000+ person crowd
- An experience that helps a first-timer understand what CHI even is before they arrive
- Something that surfaces serendipity, the talk you didn’t know you needed, the conversation that changes your work
- A tool for communities within CHI (accessibility researchers, industry practitioners, students) to find and support each other
- An experience that extends beyond the conference days, before, during, and long after
This isn’t about replicating the programme. It’s about asking: given everything ACM CHI has become, what does a great experience actually look like?
Any platform. Any approach. Vibe coding welcome. We’d encourage you to think mobile-first and web-based — a URL someone can open on their phone the moment they hear about it is likely to reach far more attendees than a native app install.
What we’ll provide to you
- Historical programme JSON data available to all, to develop your idea
- Live JSON update API during the conference, so your app can reflect real-time changes to the programme
- Compute / LLM API credits — we are actively pursuing sponsorship to make these available to shortlisted teams; watch this space!
- A presence at CHI 2027 — we’ll host a showcase at the conference venue where accepted teams can demo their apps and talk to attendees about their work
- Category awards — announced live at CHI 2027, recognising standout work across areas such as user experience, creativity, and accessibility
Selected apps will be actively promoted to CHI attendees. We’ll put your work in front of the full conference audience: highlighted apps will be featured on the ACM CHI website ahead of the event, promoted through official ACM CHI communications and social channels, and showcased in conference materials and signage on the ground.
We want attendees to actually use what you build. Accepted teams will also be given a presence at the conference itself — we’ll host a showcase at the venue where you can demo your app and talk to attendees about your work, and category awards will be announced live during the event.
Key dates
| Submissions open | Friday 11 September 2026 |
| Prototype deadline | Friday 4 December 2026 |
| Notification | End of January 2027 |
| Integration & testing period | April 2027 |
| ACM CHI 2027 | 10–14 May 2027, Pittsburgh, PA |
Full details — the data we provide, technical documentation, FAQs, and the submission form — are at chidigitalexperience.org.
Interested in judging? We’re recruiting judges from across the CHI community — get in touch at app@chi2027.acm.org. Any other queries? Same address.