Nominations for the 2026 cycle of the SIGCHI awards and special recognitions are now open. Please nominate your colleagues and recent Ph.D. graduates! The deadline is December 13, 2025 (Sat), at 11:59pm Anywhere on Earth (AoE).

Nomination form (requires a Submittable login): https://sigchi.submittable.com/submit/339253/2026-call-for-nominations-for-sigchi-awards

Please reach out to the AC for Awards Kentaro Toyama at toyama@umich.edu with any questions. Refer to the call below for more information:

Please forward this call widely to your HCI-related networks.

People can't get awards for which they are not nominated, so we hope that you will help by nominating not just your closest colleagues, but also deserving people from institutions and organizations around the world, especially from the Global South.

SIGCHI Awards identify and honor leaders and shapers of the field of human-computer interaction. We currently present awards in six categories and have four awards subcommittees to oversee their review.As we did last year, we are also inviting SIGCHI Special Recognitions to celebrate and honor individuals/groups who have made exceptional contributions to HCI in ways not captured by our existing awards. These can be of any meaningful type, but here are some examples:

• Emerging Researcher

• Excellence in HCI Education

• Community Building and Outreach

• Significant Contribution to Diversity and Inclusion in HCI

• Impactful Industry-Academia Collaboration 

• Lifetime Achievement in HCI Mentorship

• Etc.

Special recognitions are not awards, but they will help us identify new permanent awards to propose for future cycles.

Please join us for our upcoming quarterly town hall. We will be discussing ACM Open, accessibility, and awards, while leaving some time at the end for more open-ended feedback and Q&A:

1. ACM Open: What’s Next?: 2026 is the transition year as ACM moves to 100% open access. Most of our authors are already covered through ACM Open agreements. For those who are not yet covered and would like to apply for a Financial Hardship Waiver to cover Article Processing Charges (APCs) through SIG funds, the SIG will be setting up a process for enabling Financial Hardship Waivers. If you have any concerns about whether and how you will be covered, please attend.

2. Accessibility across SIGCHI: Dragan Ahmetovic, SIGCHI VP Accessibility, will present his vision for accessibility across SIGCHI our conferences, and invites you to attend and discuss where we can do better. If you have been or wanted to be an access chair at any SIGCHI conference, please join.

3. SIGCHI Awards 2026: With Kentaro Toyama as our new chair (see our announcement), we are ready to dive into SIGCHI Awards Season. The call for nomiations will go out shortly, and Kentaro will be at the Town Hall to answer any questions about the process. If you are thinking of nominating someone but do not know which category to nominate them under, or how to go about the application process, you are welcome to join!

What: Quarterly Town Hall When: November 13, 2025, 2pm UTC (in your time zone) Where: Zoom

As we get closer to January 1, 2026, we will be sharing more information regarding our SIG's transition to ACM Open. Please keep an eye out for these communications, so we can together ensure that the process of transitioning is smooth as possible for all authors of our SIG.

We are setting up a Financial Hardship Waiver Program for 2026 to ensure that any SIGCHI contributions with authors lacking ACM Open coverage (i.e. through institutional agreements or geographic waivers) and lacking support for covering their APCs will be able to apply for financial hardship waivers. Guidance and workflows for approving these waivers will be shared shortly, as soon as we have worked out these details. Also, any amount that SIGCHI allocates towards covering APCs through 2026 will be matched by the SIG Governing Board, which eases the financial burden on us and we are grateful for the support.

Our SIG is estimated to have roughly 600 contributions without ACM Open coverage. The percentage of contributions now covered by an ACM Open institutional agreement across SIGCHI conferences ranges from 70% to 93%, and is continuing to rise.

We will be organizing our next virtual town hall in a couple of weeks where we will focus on the ACM Open transition, as well as other topics. Please stay tuned for details, and join us to share your input and/or concerns.