We found significant gaps in the climates and built environments used as settings for studies of HCI outdoors. The experience of using a computer outdoors varies widely depending on location-specific factors such as weather and the availability of electricity. We surveyed 699 papers from CHI venues and found 101 studies involving a person and a computer interacting outdoors for which we could determine the study location. We categorized each study location by climate using the Koppen-Geiger scheme and by built environment using the Recreation Opportunity Spectrum. 91 of 101 studies took place in temperate or continental climates and 82 took place in urban settings. Emerging understanding of the ongoing impacts of climate change increases the importance of investigating HCI outdoors in a wider range of weather conditions. While some primitive natural settings have been preserved against development at great cost, we found no studies of HCI outdoors in those settings.
https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3491102.3507656
The ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (https://chi2022.acm.org/)