SIGCHI honours Professor Christian Sturm

Professor Christian Sturm was honoured by the Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction (SIGCHI) of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) for his years of service to global HCI education. The group particularly recognised his commitment to inclusive design competitions and the establishment of student networks in Latin America and Africa.

Committed to building student networks worldwide: Professor Christian Sturm (Photo: THI).

Bringing sustainability and user-friendliness together: The ‘Grannify’ team (Photo: THI).

SIGCHI is the world's largest professional association for human-computer interaction and brings together experts from computer science, psychology, interaction design and other disciplines. The aim is to make technology user-friendly and bring about positive social change.

Professor Sturm organises international competitions and prepares students for prestigious formats such as the Student Design Competition at the CHI conference. He is involved in conferences such as AFRICHI, CLIHC, JIHCI, and IndiaHCI. One example of its successful promotion of young talent is ‘Grannify’, a project by Tarun Verma, Monika Marta Szuban, Natalie Sachin Valsangkar, and Hannah Müller from the Master's programme in User Experience Design. It was created as part of the course ‘Entrepreneurial UX for Sustainable Solutions’ in the winter semester 2024/25. With this project, the students reached the semi-finals of this year's ACM SIGCHI Student Design Competition, which will take place together with the final at the end of April in Japan.

Food waste accounts for more than 50 percent of household waste across the EU. ‘Grannify’ connects generations digitally: older people pass on their knowledge of food preservation, while younger people learn sustainable practices. Gamification, practical tasks, and a community dashboard make traditional knowledge suitable for everyday use and support sustainability goals.

The SIGCHI award for Professor Sturm underlines the importance of innovative educational projects at THI.

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