SIGCHI was formed in 1982 by renaming and refocusing the Special Interest Group on Social and Behavioral Computing (SIGSOC). Lorraine Borman, previously editor of the SIGSOC Bulletin, was its first chair.^[2]

The formation of the ACM SIGCHI was first publicly announced in 1982 during the Human Factors in Computer Systems conference in Gaithersburg, Maryland, US, organized by Bill Curtis and Ben Shneiderman. ^[3] The inaugural CHI conference was hosted the year after, in 1983.^[4] In 1988, the UIST and CSCW conferences were added.^[4]

Apart from conference proceedings, SIGCHI publishes a number of periodicals.

• SIGCHI Bulletin
• interactions
• ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction

Each year SIGCHI inducts around 7 or 8 people into the CHI Academy, honouring them for their significant contribution to the field of human–computer interaction. It also gives out a CHI Lifetime Achievement Award for research and practice, the CHI Lifetime Service Award, and the CHI Social Impact Award. Since 2018, SIGCHI also awards the Outstanding Dissertation Award to recognize excellent thesis by Ph.D. recipients in HCI.

• 1998 - Douglas C. Engelbart (award called the SIGCHI Special Recognition Award in 1998)
• 2000 - Stuart K. Card
• 2001 - Ben Shneiderman
• 2002 - Donald A. Norman
• 2003 - John M. Carroll
• 2004 - Tom Moran
• 2005 - Tom Landauer
• 2006 - Judith S. Olson and Gary M. Olson
• 2007 - James D. Foley
• 2008 - Bill Buxton
• 2009 - Sara Kiesler
• 2010
  • Practice: Karen Holtzblatt
  • Research: Lucy Suchman
• 2011
  • Practice: Larry Tesler
  • Research: Terry Winograd
• 2012
  • Practice: Joy Mountford
  • Research: Dan R. Olsen, Jr.
• 2013
  • Practice: Jakob Nielsen
  • Research: George G. Robertson
• 2014
  • Practice: Gillian Crampton Smith
  • Research: Steve Whittaker
  • Special Recognition: Ted Nelson
• 2015
  • Practice: Susan M. Dray
  • Research: James D. Hollan
• 2016
  • Practice: Jeff A. Johnson
  • Research: Robert E. Kraut
• 2017
  • Practice: Ernest Edmonds
  • Research: Brad A. Myers
• 2018
  • Practice: Arnold M. Lund
  • Research: Steven K. Feiner
• 2019
  • Practice: Daniel Rosenberg
  • Research: Hiroshi Ishii
• 2020
  • Practice: David Canfield Smith
  • Research: Susan T. Dumais
• 2021
  • Practice: John T. Richards
  • Research: Scott Hudson
• 2022
  • Practice: Steven Pemberton
  • Research: Yvonne Rogers
• 2023^[5]
  • Practice: Deborah J. Mayhew
  • Research: Gregory Abowd

• 2001 - Austin Henderson
• 2002 - Dan R. Olsen, Jr.
• 2003 - Lorraine Borman
• 2004 - Robin Jeffries and Gene Lynch
• 2005 - Gary Perlman, Marilyn Mantei Tremaine, Sara Bly, Don J. Patterson, and John Morris
• 2006 - Susan M. Dray
• 2007 - Richard I. Anderson
• 2008 - John Karat and Marian Williams
• 2009 - Clare-Marie Karat and Steven Pemberton
• 2010 - Mary Czerwinski
• 2011 - Arnie Lund and Jim Miller
• 2012 - Michael Atwood and Kevin Schofield
• 2013 - Joseph A. Konstan
• 2014 - Wendy Mackay and Tom Hewett
• 2015 - Michel Beaudouin-Lafon and Jean Scholtz
• 2016 - Gary M. Olson and Gerrit van der Veer
• 2017 - Scott E. Hudson and Zhengjie Liu
• 2018 - Maria Francesca Constabile and John C. Thomas
• 2019 - Bill Hefley
• 2020 - Gilbert Cockton and Catherine Plaisant
• 2021 - Wendy Kellogg and Philippe Palanque
• 2022 - Geraldine Fitzpatrick
• 2023 - Elizabeth Churchill and Loren Terveen

• 2005 - Gregg Vanderheiden
• 2006 - Ted Henter
• 2007 - Gregory Abowd and Gary Marsden
• 2008 - Vicki Hanson
• 2009 - Helen Petrie
• 2010 - Ben Bederson and Allison Druin
• 2011 - Allen Newell and Clayton Lewis
• 2012 - Batya Friedman
• 2013 - Sara J. Czaja
• 2014 - Richard E. Ladner
• 2015 - Leysia Palen
• 2016 - Jonathan Lazar
• 2017 - Jacob O. Wobbrock and Indrani Medhi Thies
• 2018 - Lorrie Faith Cranor
• 2019 - Gillian R. Hayes
• 2020 - Ronald M. Baecker and Bonnie Nardi
• 2021 - Maria Cecília Calani Baranauskas, Andy Dearden and Juan Gilbert
• 2022 - Liz Gerber, Jennifer Mankoff and Aaditeshwar Seth
• 2023 - Shaowen Bardzell, Munmun de Choudhury and Nicola Dell

• 2018 - Stefanie Mueller and Blase Ur
• 2019 - Chris Elsden, Anna Maria Feit and Robert Xiao
• 2020 - Katta Spiel and Paul Strohmeier
• 2021 - Josh Andres, Arunesh Mathur and Qian Yang
• 2022 - Aakash Gautam, Fred Hohman and Anna Lisa Martin-Niedecken
• 2023 - Megan Hofmann, Dhruv Jain, Kai Lukoff

SIGCHI is governed by a set of by-laws and SIGCHI’s Elected Officers are the President, the Executive Vice-President, the Vice-President for Membership and Communications, the Vice-President for Finance, and two Vice-Presidents at large. The Executive Committee (EC) also includes editors of membership publications and appointed officers including the Vice-President for Publications, the Vice-President for Conferences, the Vice-President for Chapters, the Vice-President for Operations, and the immediate past Chair.

President: Gerrit van der Veer^[6]

President: Gerrit van der Veer^[7]

From July 2015 to July 2018, the SIGCHI President was Loren Terveen of GroupLens Research at the University of Minnesota and the Vice President was Helena Mentis of University of Maryland Baltimore County^[8]

From July 2018 to July 2021, the SIGCHI President was Helena Mentis of University of Maryland Baltimore County with Vice President Cliff Lampe of University of Michigan.

The current SIGCHI President is Neha Kumar with Vice President Shaowen Bardzell. The President and VP run as a team and were elected to the positions for a three-year term.

Apart from CHI, SIGCHI sponsors or co-sponsors over 20 specialized conferences in topics related to HCI.

• ACM Conference on Supporting Groupwork (GROUP)
• International Conference on Tangible, Embedded and Embodied Interaction (TEI)
• International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces (IUI)
• ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human Robot Interaction (HRI)
• Symposium on Eye Tracking Research and Applications (ETRA)
• ACM International Conference on Interactive Media Experiences (IMX)
• Collective Intelligence (CI)
• Interaction, Design and Children (IDC)
• ACM SIGCHI Symposium on Engineering Interactive Computing Systems (EICS)
• Designing Interactive Systems Conference (DIS)
• International Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation, and Personalization (UMAP)
• ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing (Ubicomp)
• International Conference on Automotive User Interfaces and Interactive Vehicular Applications (AutomotiveUI)
• ACM Conference on Recommender Systems (RecSys)
• International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services (MobileHCI)
• Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW)
• ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST)
• International Conference on Multimodal Interaction (ICMI)
• Symposium on Spatial User Interaction (SUI)
• ACM Symposium and Virtual Reality Software and Technology
• Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in Play (CHIPLAY)
• Interactive Surfaces and Spaces (ISS)
• Creativity and Cognition (C&C)

SIGCHI provides resources for the community to expand, grow and communicate in the form of Grants.

• SIGCHI Development Fund: Intended to support community-led initiatives to spur communication among local communities.^[9]
• SIGCHI Early Career Mentoring fund: to support early-career scholars to participate in a meeting for mentorship.^[10]
• SIGCHI Student Travel Grants: to provide students the opportunity to attend any of the SIGCHI Conferences.^[11]

• ACM
• SIGCHI