The Unminuted Conference: Why HCI 2009’s Corridors Belong in the Archive
Photo: Visem, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Every conference has an official programme and an unofficial one. At HCI 2009 in Cambridge, the official programme consisted of papers, panels, demonstrations and the published proceedings. The unofficial programme consisted of coffee breaks, lunch queues, receptions, corridor conversations and the small ephemera that delegates carried home in bags and pockets. The archive has been diligent about the first. The second survives mainly in memory, and that is a problem for anyone trying to understand how UK UX research actually travelled in 2009.
The break as designed space
It is tempting to treat the coffee break as an absence of programme. It is better understood as a scheduled interval with its own architecture. The tea urn, the trays of biscuits, the clusters of chairs and the poster boards nearby all shape who speaks to whom. In 2009, a UK delegate might move in a single morning between a university lab, a consultancy and a public-sector research team. The break was one of the few places where those worlds could meet without a formal agenda.
The corridor paper was never written, but it was circulated. A PhD student could test a half-formed idea on a usability consultant. A lecturer could discover that another department had solved a problem already encountered. A practitioner could ask a question that exposed the gap between a method as described in a paper and a method as practised in a project. These exchanges were not recorded in proceedings, yet they shaped what was submitted the following year.
How ideas travelled in 2009
Before ubiquitous social media, conference travel was a significant mechanism for the movement of ideas. Email lists, blogs and early Twitter use mattered, but face-to-face contact did something different. It allowed for hesitation, interruption and the kind of follow-up question that is difficult to put in writing. The social programme provided the conditions for that contact. The reception was not merely hospitality; it was a boundary-crossing event. The conference dinner was not merely dinner; it was a place where institutional hierarchies loosened enough for conversation.
The surviving ephemera tell part of this story. A delegate list, a programme with handwritten corrections, a business card, a receipt, a photograph of a break area: these are not trivia. They are traces of network formation. They show which labs were present, which consultancies sent staff, which research councils funded attendance, and which conversations were possible. For technology historians, such traces can be more revealing than a polished abstract. They show how a community reproduced itself.
The archival bias towards the proceedings
Proceedings-shaped history overrepresents the polished and underrepresents the informal. It can make a field look more orderly than it was. Papers present arguments as if they emerged fully formed; the social programme shows them being negotiated. It also reveals inclusion and exclusion. Who could afford to attend? Who had caring responsibilities? Who was invited to dinner? Who knew whom? An archive that preserves only the formal record cannot answer these questions, and the absence is not neutral.
Preserving social traces requires care. Delegate lists, photographs and correspondence involve personal data, and an archive should not treat consent as a formality. Anonymisation, embargoes and selective collection are all appropriate. But the ethical difficulty of preservation is not a reason to leave the informal record to chance. The alternative is a history written by the proceedings alone, which is a history of what was finished rather than what was alive.
A modest proposal for 2026
The HCI 2009 Archive should collect the social programme as infrastructure. That means programmes, badges, menus, venue maps and annotated schedules. It means oral histories from delegates about the conversations they remember. It means photographs of break areas, where possible with consent, and a record of the spaces that made exchange possible. It means treating the corridor as a research setting, not a distraction from the real conference.
The coffee break was not a break from research. It was research’s informal channel. For UK UX researchers in 2026, that may sound familiar. Much of our work still depends on the unminuted conversation, the quick critique and the introduction made in a queue. If we are serious about preserving the conversations that shaped UX, we should archive the corridors as well as the papers.
