Important Dates

• 25 Oct 2015 2 Nov 2015, 11:59 pm PDT: Entry Submission Deadline
• 27 Nov 2015, 11:59 pm PST: Notification of Acceptance
• 18 Dec 2015, 11:59 pm PST: Camera Ready Deadline
• 23 Dec 2015: Team Commitment and Registration

Call for Participation

Great News: Thanks to the generosity of our latest sponsor we can waive the conference fee for up to two Student Design Challenge participants per selected team!

TEI is the ACM International conference on Tangible, Embedded and Embodied Interaction (TEI), addressing issues of human-computer interaction, design, interactive art, user experience, creativity, tools and technologies. This year’s theme for the student design challenge is:

Tools of Creativity. Embodied metaphors and creative action.
Think outside the box - Free your mind- A lightbulb went off in my head-Creative spark - Try a different angle on the problem - Look at things in a new light - Tackle the problem - Grasping at straws - Brain freeze - Writer’s block

Our body is our manual. How we think about the world is fundamentally tied to our bodily experience of being in the world. Recent research even suggests that physically acting out embodied metaphors can enhance creative thinking and problem solving. Quite literally, sitting outside of a box might make you a more creative person.   Building off of this research, this year’s TEI design challenge addresses the tools of creativity. The work of artists and craftspeople are in many ways defined by their tools, clothing, and other artifacts of professional work. Think paintbrushes, chisels, knives, ballet shoes, and, so on. One of the original inspirations for the field of Tangible Interaction comes from the observation that much of the richness and expressivity of these tools are being lost in the translation to computer-based interfaces. Somehow the pallet knife in Photoshop feels like an impoverished parody of the real thing. And yet, the digital world offers efficiency and scale that is impossible to match with traditional materials. Thus, this year’s challenge focuses on the tools of creative professionals.

Student Teams are Invited To

• Pick a creative domain. Examples could include visual arts, culinary arts, music, dance, or writing. We will be very broad in our definition of “creative”.
• Pick a tool of this domain (for example a painter’s brush, a poet’s pen, a chef’s knife, a dancer’s body, a musician’s violin, etc.) and reimagine it as a physical / digital hybrid tool.
• If possible think of an embodied metaphor that can be embedded in the tool, e.g. a tool that adds creative sparks or that warms the heart.
• Create a compelling demo with this tool that invites participants to engage in creative exploration at TEI!

Submission Process

• Submit a PDF by email to the Student Design Challenge Chairs in the SIGCHI Extended Abstracts format (4-6 pages).
• Your submission should include a link to a demo video (3 minutes max) posted on a website (e.g. YouTube or Vimeo) that is accessible to reviewers.
• Submissions should not be anonymous.

If you have further questions about the Student Design Challenge for TEI’16, contact the SDC Chairs.

The Student Design Challenge has an extended deadline: 2 November 2015