Back in November, I had the pleasure of attending, and presenting at, SportsHCI 2025, the inaugural SportsHCI conference, hosted at the University of Twente in Enschede.
With a little distance now (and a quieter December moment to reflect), it really does feel like an important milestone for the field. Following the runaway success of the SportsHCI Dagstuhl Seminar in 2023, and last year’s Grand Challenges paper, it was exciting to bring this growing community together in person again.
What stood out most was the atmosphere: warm, friendly, generous, and intellectually ambitious. There was a real sense of a community forming – people making space for one another’s work, asking careful questions, and sharing ideas with a generosity.
A big thank you to the organising committee for the care and hard work that went into bringing SportsHCI 2025 together – it was a great conference experience.
I presented three pieces of work at the conference: two full papers and one poster.
Why We Should Care About Inclusivity in SportsHCI
This paper is a manifesto-style contribution that argues (plainly!) that inclusivity has to sit at the heart of SportsHCI — not as a nice-to-have, but as something foundational to how we define the field, what we design for, and who we treat as an “athlete” or participant.
Rather than being a “problem list”, the paper is intentionally constructive: it aims to offer a shared grounding for future work, and a research agenda that foregrounds bodies, identities, access, and care. Presenting it at the first SportsHCI conference felt particularly timely — a chance to help shape what we collectively choose to value as the community grows.
If you work in sports tech, health tech, wellbeing, wearables, personal informatics, or inclusive design, I hope this paper is useful as a reference point (or a provocation) for your own work.
You Can’t Be What You Can’t See: Community-Based Support and Representation in Diverse Cycling Communities on Instagram
This is a strong empirical paper exploring how representation and community-based support operate in diverse cycling spaces on Instagram — and how platform design (and platform change) shape what participation can look like.
One of the core arguments is that for many riders — especially those who don’t see themselves reflected in traditional cycling cultures — Instagram can function as a kind of patchwork community infrastructure. Not a perfect one (far from it), but sometimes a meaningful one: enabling connection, learning, encouragement, and a sense of “I belong here”.
This work was very much a collaboration:
- Faye Green did a huge amount of work throughout the project (and brought so much care and insight to it).
- John Rooksby made thoughtful contributions that strengthened both the analysis and the framing.
If you’re working on online communities, representation, inclusive participation, or platform governance (and its human costs), I think you’ll find plenty to connect with here.
Reflections and Ethnographic Insights from Ten Years of Virtual Cycling on Zwift: A Longitudinal, Lived Perspective on Community, Access, and Life Transitions
This poster brings together a decade of lived engagement with Zwift, framed through a longitudinal, reflective, ethnographic lens. It focuses on how virtual cycling weaves into everyday life over time — not just as a “fitness tool”, but as something entangled with community, access, motivation, identity, and life transitions.
I’m particularly interested here in the messy, real-world picture: how people come in and out of sport; how access and energy shift; how life events reshape what participation even looks like; and how platforms can either support that (sometimes) or work against it (often unintentionally).
This is part of a broader stream of work I’m developing around lived experience, virtual fitness, and inclusive SportsHCI — with Zwift as a rich, complicated case.
Looking ahead
I’m really looking forward to SportsHCI 2026. If the first conference was anything to go by, this community is going to be a special one — and I’m hoping we can keep the same warmth and generosity as it grows.
If you’d like to chat about any of the themes above, please do get in touch. I’m always up for chats and collaborations!
