Authors:
Regan Mandryk
What are you working on right now?
I'm a professor of computer science at the University of Victoria in British Columbia and a Canada Research Chair in Digital Gaming and Immersive Social Technologies. My focus is mainly on designing, developing, and evaluating digital games that provide social and emotional benefits to players, as well as on developing models and systems to combat the types of things that undermine those benefits, such as toxicity and obsessive play.
What inspired you to forge a career in HCI?
I have an interdisciplinary background. My bachelor's degree is in mathematics and physics, my master's is in kinesiology, and my Ph.D. is in computer science. I'm very much a person who enjoys computational, statistical, and technical work, but I always wanted to apply these skills to benefit humanity. If we are not asking for technology innovation to benefit people or the planet, why are we even considering it? Humans are complex, and there are many unique challenges in working at the intersection of technology and people that can fuel a lifelong career.
Have you had any pivots in your career?
Although it seems that I've pivoted multiple times, my work has actually been much more linear. In my Ph.D. work in the early 2000s, I built mathematical models of emotions, based on physiological sensors gathered from people interacting with computer games, which brought my skills in math, kinesiology, and computer science to the fore.
Which volunteering roles are you taking on right now?
I've been really involved with SIGCHI over the years, cobuilding a conference community from scratch—CHI PLAY—and holding most roles on that committee multiple times. I was the general cochair for the CHI conference in 2018, and I chaired the Steering Committee from 2019 to 2022. I have led several groups working on the format, finances, and review process for the conference, and I also served on the SIGCHI Executive Committee and other SIGCHI committees (e.g., publications, lifetime awards). I recently started a local SIGCHI chapter, the Salish Sea SIGCHI Chapter, that brings together researchers from the west coast of Canada.
If we are not asking for technology innovation to benefit people or the planet, why are we even considering it?
How long have you been in this role?
I moved to the University of Victoria in May 2023 and immediately started looking at ways to contribute to building up our local HCI networks. Everyone seemed keen on forming a SIGCHI chapter.
What drew you to take on this role?
We have so many great professors in HCI in the region at multiple universities—the University of Victoria, Simon Fraser University, the University of British Columbia—who supervise amazing students and work with a thriving local tech industry. We are also in close proximity to the Puget Sound SIGCHI Chapter but operating in a different country and different context. I wanted to help build stronger ties and contribute to regional community-building events, such as seminar series, summer schools, pre-CHI events, and writing retreats. As we aim to reduce our travel, it is important to build strong regional communities. That's hard in a place like Canada with large geographical distances between cities and a lack of high-speed trains connecting them.
What are you working on right now?
We just created the chapter, so our goal for this year is to do one summer school writing event and a pre- or post-CHI event. Next year, we also hope to get our seminar series underway and conduct more student exchanges and hackathons.
What is one thing you'd like to see happening in the HCI community?
I would love for us to find ways to highlight important innovation and scientific discovery. The pace of publication in our field is intense, and it's hard to find the important contributions when so much work is being produced. I would also like us to be more proactive in designing the future rather than responding to what's out there.
Ten years from now, what issues do you imagine the HCI community may be confronting?
This is a challenging question, because there is so much flux and generative AI development at the moment. At the current scale of publication, HCI is in a peer review crisis. One of my roles is coleading a working group in which we are reimagining peer review for the CHI conference. If we don't intervene and accept current growth in scale, I can't imagine a manageable peer review system in three years, let alone 10.
What excites you about the future of the HCI field?
We are pretty unique in understanding humans, computers, and their interaction. We have wicked societal problems globally in health, education, well-being, climate change, democracy, and social connection, and HCI researchers have a unique set of skills to design innovative solutions that benefit people and the planet.
What advice would you give a young colleague at the start of their professional career?
I always like the idea of maintaining a high-risk and high-reward line of work that may or may not pay off, alongside a more bread-and-butter line of work. This allows researchers to ensure career progression, while also opening opportunities for true innovation and radical progress. I've had some of these blue-sky projects that succeeded and failed, but they helped me grow as a researcher and consider the potential impact of my work.
What is one thing you have gotten wrong about tech?
Democratization of access to technology has had a drastic knock-on effect, eroding the importance of expertise. I don't think I was prepared in the early days of the Internet for the future we live in today.
Is there a vision of the future that you had as a child that still persists?
We can be driven by values other than productivity. I have devoted my entire career to a domain that many would consider frivolous (digital gaming), but by trying to understand emotions, experiences, social connections, and well-being, I'm driven to innovate toward a future that isn't defined by how we are contributing to capitalism. This is a vision I have held for my whole life, and it only gets stronger with age.
Author
Regan Mandryk is a professor of computer science at the University of Victoria. Her research explores the potential of digital games for social connection, emotion regulation, and mental health. She pioneered the area of affective physiological evaluation for computer games in her Ph.D. research from Simon Fraser University, with support from Electronic Arts. [email protected]
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The Digital Library is published by the Association for Computing Machinery. Copyright © 2025 ACM, Inc.
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