Five TCO Papers at CHI 2026, Including an Honourable Mention
Research from the Toronto Climate Observatory was featured at the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2026), the premier venue for human-computer interaction research, held April 13–17 in Barcelona.
TCO faculty, students, and collaborators presented five papers on how people, communities, and technologies meet in a changing climate:
▷ The Toronto Water Atlas: Staging Encounters With Nature Through Design – What does it take to design for nature as plural and multiple rather than as a single thing to be managed? Drawing on a seven-month collaboration among artists, scientists, and community members, the paper examines how the Toronto Water Atlas sustained many different enactments of the region’s waterways through its design choices. By Taneea S Agrawaal, Nils Bonfils, Amelia Dogan (University of Washington), Siyi (Reyna) Wu, and Robert Soden.
▷ Following Primates: Approaching Conflict in Contested Regions – Conflict is a natural part of community-based research. Through ethnography and a mapping workshop with an environmental research group working at a contested ecological site, the paper shows how local conflicts over data, mapping, and technology are bound up with broader political, historical, and value-based contestations, and how designers can engage conflict constructively. By Aarjav Chauhan, Virendra Mathur, Aakash Gautam (University of Pittsburgh), and Robert Soden.
▷ Context, Uncertainty, and Interdependence: Crisis Informatics and Severe Weather Risk Communication for People with Visual Impairments – Interviews with adults with visual impairments about their experiences during weather emergencies, and what they mean for risk communication that accounts for social and infrastructural context. By Sophia Jit, Adrian Petterson, Amanda Leiva, Priyank Chandra, Jennifer Spinney (York University), and Robert Soden.
▷ Resilience to Disruption: Accessible Navigation for People with Visual Impairment – A journey-mapping workshop on how people with visual impairments combine navigation apps, orientation and mobility training, and human assistance to build routines that withstand disruption, especially during severe weather. By Trevor Cross, Ishani Pandey, Sophia Jit, Robert Soden, and Priyank Chandra.
▷ Reflections Towards an Ecology of Internet Connectivity: Three Speculative Scenarios Involving Foot Pedals – Three speculative scenarios, each featuring a foot pedal that mediates internet access, that question HCI’s assumption of always-on connectivity and reimagine connectivity as a multi-dimensional ecology. By Richmond Wong (Georgia Tech), Nick Merrill (UC Berkeley), and Robert Soden.
🌟 A special congratulations to Richmond Wong, Nick Merrill, and Robert Soden: Reflections Towards an Ecology of Internet Connectivity received a Best Paper Honourable Mention, a recognition reserved for the top papers submitted to CHI each year.
Unless noted, authors are at the University of Toronto, across the Department of Computer Science, the School of the Environment, and the Faculty of Information.