Pictorials

Important dates

*Deadline times are in AEST – Australian Eastern Standard Time

General information

We are very pleased to announce a new Pictorials track for TEI2020. Pictorials were first introduced at DIS2014 with the aim of supporting the presentation and communication of research ideas, methods, provocations, insights, and contributions in a more visually rich format. Since then it has been successfully implemented in DIS and C&C conferences with an increasing interest from researchers and practitioners. We are very excited to offer this new track and welcome your submissions!

What are Pictorials?

Pictorials are papers in which the visual components (e.g. diagrams, sketches, illustrations, renderings, photographs, annotated photographs, and collages) play a major role in conveying the ideas and contributions of a study in addition to the accompanying text. Pictorials leverage the power of visual communication with the effective use of visual languages and high-quality images. They may have a practical or theoretical nature or both.

Through Pictorials, researchers, practitioners, industry professionals, artists, designers and students from various disciplines, including engineering, interaction design, computer science, product design, media studies and the arts are encouraged to express and unpack their design practices and projects in visually rich ways.

What to submit?

We welcome submissions related to the rapidly developing field of tangible, embedded, and embodied interaction as well as the conference theme of Future Bodies, Future Technologies. The theme invites participants to speculate on a vision of how technologies could interact and interweave with our bodies as they augment the embodied human experience. In this broad context, submissions may cover diverse topics that include (but are not limited to):

• Design decisions and methods employed to create new interactive techniques and tools.
• Artistic explorations or practice-based research in or through tangible computational media technologies to support new human-machine interactions.
• The design or deployment of interactive technologies to explore new ways to engage and activate human, beyond-human or collective bodies.
• Perspectives on tangible, embedded and embodied interaction ranging from arts to science from design to education.
• Other insights, lessons learned, practices or processes of designing and evaluating tangible, embedded and embodied interaction technologies.

Some important points to consider when preparing your pictorials:

• Does your work require a Pictorial format, or would it be clearer in a more conventional textual form?
• Is the production value for the images and/or diagrams of high quality?
• Are images/diagrams emphasized over text as the primary means of communicating the research contribution?
• Are the implications for HCI and/or interaction design clear? These may be descriptive, analytic, generative, synthesis-oriented, and even manifestos.
• Does every image used in the Pictorial play a meaningful role and clearly present the idea on its own or with the support of text?
• Does the placement of images and text compose a good narrative?

Submission guidelines

Pictorials must be submitted in the TEI2020 Pictorials format (see below) and not exceed 12 pages, excluding references. The first page of the submission should include the submission’s title, author(s) and their affiliation(s) (leave blank for double-blind review), and a written abstract of no more than 150 words succinctly describing the background and context of the pictorial as well as its contribution to the TEI community. Further written parts known from other conference formats such as Introduction, Conclusion, Discussion, Acknowledgements, and References are optional. The main part of the submission should be an annotated visual composition and we encourage submissions to use the format creatively— see the TEI pictorials example template, which was generated from an Adobe InDesign file.

We strongly advise you to use the new InDesign template to compose your pictorial. It is much easier to work with and imagine intensive forms in InDesign. If you do not have access to InDesign, please use the current ACM Extended Abstract template (available under Templates). All submissions should be anonymous and submitted via the TEI2020 Precision Conference (PCS) system.

• InDesign template – https://tei.acm.org/2020/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/Pictorials2020-package-folder.zip
• Word Extended Abstracts template – (see Templates page)

Please submit via the Precision Conference (PCS) website.

Review and Selection

Double-blind review submissions are juried by the TEI Pictorials program committee, recruited from academia and industry by the chairs of the format. Accepted TEI Pictorials will be distributed by the conference and published in the ACM Digital Library where they will remain accessible to researchers and practitioners worldwide. Authors will be expected to attend the conference and will be assigned a time and location to present accepted submission to conference attendees.

Example Pictorials

• Eli Blevis. 2014. Stillness and motion, meaning and form. In Proceedings of the 2014 conference on Designing interactive systems (DIS ‘14). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 493-502. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/2598510.2602963   
• Audrey Desjardins, Ron Wakkary, and William Odom. 2016. Behind the Lens: A Visual Exploration of Epistemological Commitments in HCI Research on the Home. In Proceedings of the 2016 ACM Conference on Designing Interactive Systems (DIS ‘16). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 360-376. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/2901790.2901910
• Elvin Karana, Elisa Giaccardi, Niels Stamhuis, and Jasper Goossensen. 2016. The Tuning of Materials: A Designer’s Journey. In Proceedings of the 2016 ACM Conference on Designing Interactive Systems (DIS ‘16). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 619-631. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/2901790.2901909
• Heather McKinnon. 2016. Finding Design Value in Modern Mundanity. In Proceedings of the 2016 ACM Conference on Designing Interactive Systems (DIS ‘16). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 1059-1071. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/2901790.2901906
• Thomas Dykes, Jayne Wallace, Mark Blythe, and James Thomas. 2016. Paper Street View: A Guided Tour of Design and Making Using Comics. In Proceedings of the 2016 ACM Conference on Designing Interactive Systems (DIS ‘16). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 334-346. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/2901790.2901904
• Pauline Gourlet and Thierry Dassé. 2017. Cairn: A Tangible Apparatus for Situated Data Collection, Visualization and Analysis. In Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Designing Interactive Systems (DIS ‘17). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 247-258. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3064663.3064794
• James Pierce and Carl DiSalvo. 2017. Projecting Network Anxieties with Alternative Design Metaphors. In Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Designing Interactive Systems (DIS ‘17). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 1383-1393. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3064663.3064795

Pictorials chairs

If you have any questions about the Pictorials, please contact the Pictorials chairs.

Baki Kocaballi, Macquarie University

Tom Jenkins, IT University of Copenhagen

You can contact the chairs by emailing pictorial_chairs@tei.acm.org