Names in the Margin: Reconstructing the UK's UX Research Clusters from HCI 2009's Affiliation Lists

Open a copy of the HCI 2009 proceedings at the programme and you will learn what happened in the lecture theatres. Turn to the back and you will learn something the programme never intended to disclose: who was working with whom, in which building, under which departmental letterhead. The author index is a modest piece of apparatus — surnames, initials, page numbers, set in a smaller type than anything else in the volume. It is also, for the technology historian, one of the most candid documents the conference produced.

This article sets out a method rather than a definitive finding. It proposes that the back matter of HCI 2009 — the author index, the affiliation lines beneath each paper title, the committee listings and the occasional errata slip — be read as a network diagram drawn by accident. Read closely, it records institutional clusters, repeated collaborations, and the movement of UK researchers between departments at a moment when human-computer interaction was consolidating its claim on a distinct professional identity.

A Document Built for a Different Purpose

The author index was compiled for navigation, not for analysis. Its function was to let a reader who remembered a surname but not a session find the relevant page. That utilitarian origin is precisely what makes it useful. Unlike a foreword, which is written with an eye on reputation, or a keynote abstract, which is written with an eye on the audience, an index is compiled by a production editor under deadline. It records what the papers actually said about their authors' institutional homes, including the awkward cases: the author with two affiliations, the author listed under a company address, the doctoral student whose department appears without a faculty.

Anyone working from a digitised copy should begin with the caveats. Optical character recognition handles surnames inconsistently; hyphenated names break across line endings; the difference between a middle initial and a first name is often lost. In the printed volume, the affiliation lines beneath titles were frequently set from author-supplied copy and left unedited, which means the same institution may appear as a department, a faculty, a research group or a trading name within a few pages of itself. These inconsistencies are not noise to be cleaned away. They are evidence of how researchers described themselves when nobody was standardising the answer.

Affiliation as Geography

The first thing the affiliation lines reveal is a map with far more texture than the delegate list suggests. Papers arriving from the UK in 2009 came from a recognisable spread of institutional types: the older civic universities with established computing departments, the London colleges with their separate and sometimes overlapping research groupings, the post-1992 institutions where interaction design was often housed alongside media or business rather than computer science, and a small but telling presence from industry laboratories and consultancies.

The distribution matters because it shows where the disciplinary infrastructure actually sat. A paper's address line tells you which department was willing to release a researcher to write it, which in turn tells you something about local priorities. Where a single building supplies three or four submissions across different tracks, the historian should take note: that is a cluster, and clusters of that kind usually predate the conference and outlast it.

Repeated Names, Repeated Rooms

Co-authorship is the more interesting layer. The index, read alongside the affiliation lines, allows a reconstruction of who appeared more than once and with whom. A supervisor-student pairing that recurs across a full paper and a doctoral consortium entry; a name that appears once in a workshop position paper and again in a main-track paper with a different second author; a company researcher who co-authors with an academic in one paper and appears alone in another — these are the ordinary mechanics of a research community at work.

They are also the mechanics that conference programmes conceal. The programme organises by session and by time, cutting across the collaborative structures that produced the work. The back matter reorganises by name, and in doing so restores a view of the field as a set of working relationships rather than a schedule.

The Index as a Record of Movement

Affiliations are snapshots, and the value of a snapshot increases when it can be compared with another taken a few years later. A researcher listed at one institution in 2009 and at another in a subsequent proceedings volume is not a footnote curiosity; the move is a trace of how UK UX capacity was redistributed — through doctoral completions, through the founding and closure of research groups, through the steady drift of interaction specialists into iSchools, business schools and dedicated user-experience units.

Comparisons of this kind should be made cautiously. A change of address may reflect a new post, a visiting arrangement, a joint appointment or simply a different administrative label for the same office. The archive's discipline is to record the change without over-interpreting it, and to note what the source cannot resolve.

What the Back Matter Cannot Say

It cannot say who did the work. Author order in 2009 reflected a range of local conventions, and the index flattens them all. It cannot say who was present at the conference — appearing in the proceedings is not the same as wearing a lanyard. Nor can it capture the technicians, research assistants and administrators whose labour sustained the groups the index describes.

What it can do is give the historian a scaffold: a list of names, addresses and page numbers from which other sources — photographs, delegate lists, departmental annual reports, the acknowledgements in later papers — can be hung. Used alone, the index is a curiosity. Used as a starting point, it is a finding aid of considerable precision.

Why It Still Matters in 2026

Seventeen years on, the questions that animated HCI 2009 have been partly answered and partly abandoned, but the institutional history has not been written with the care it deserves. Much of the UK's present user-experience research capacity can be traced, in documentary terms, to groupings that were visible in the small print of that volume. The back matter is where those groupings were recorded before anyone thought to write a history of them.

For the archive, the practical recommendation is straightforward. Transcribe the index and the affiliation lines in full, preserve the inconsistencies, and publish them alongside the programme rather than behind it. The front of the book has had its share of attention. The margin deserves the same treatment.