Call for Pictorials

Important Dates

Event Deadline
Abstract deadline July 25, 2023 AoE
Full submission deadline August 1, 2023 AoE
Notification of conditional acceptance October 9, 2023 AoE
Camera-ready deadline November 15, 2023 AoE
TEI 2024 conference February 11-14, 2024
Check your local time in AoE.

Full papers and pictorials published at TEI 2024 are ACM archival publications and will be made available through the ACM in the Digital Library. Pictorials at TEI leverage the power of visual communication for physical design objects, documenting tangible research methods and results.

General Information

Given the increasing popularity and weight of pictorial contributions across academic conferences (DIS, C&C, IASDR), TEI2024 will continue offering a Pictorials track. Pictorials were first introduced at DIS2014 with the aim of supporting the presentation and communication of research ideas, design practice, methods, provocations, insights, and contributions in a more visually rich format. Since then, Pictorials have been successfully implemented in DIS and C&C conferences and were implemented in TEI for the first time in 2020.

 

This call is adapted from texts composed by previous Pictorials chairs from TEI 2020-2023. We thank the previous years’ Pictorial chairs of DIS, C&C, and TEI for the ground-breaking work, inspiration and continuous development of Pictorials as a type of contribution format as well as research output in its own right.

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 ideas and research contributions 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.

 

Pictorials are meant to contribute to knowledge in themselves rather than merely document concepts, methods, and processes that we already know. Visual components can be contributions to design knowledge in and of themselves, as a form of making, but they should also be accompanied by a narrative that helps the TEI audience understand what the knowledge contribution is. It is this scaffolding that transforms a Pictorial into research and guarantees that it can be treated as an argument in research discourse. At the same time, the textual narrative should be just that – a scaffolding to support the contribution of the visual content.

What to submit?

We welcome submissions related to the rapidly developing field of tangible, embedded, and embodied interaction. In this broad context, submissions may cover diverse types of 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.

    • Perspectives on tangible, embedded, and embodied interaction ranging from arts to science and 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:

  1. Does your work require a Pictorial format, or would it be clearer in a more conventional textual form?
  2. Is the contribution that is presented original and complete? If not, you may want to consider a WIP submission instead.
  3. Is the production value for the images and/or diagrams of high quality?
  4. Are images/diagrams emphasized over text as the primary means of communicating the research contribution?
  5. Are the implications for the TEI research community clear and sound? These may be descriptive, analytic, generative, synthesis-oriented, and even manifestos. In addition, the related conclusion or claim is reached through discussion, reflection, and/or evaluation of some sort.
  6. 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?
  7. Does the placement of images and text compose a good narrative?

Submission Guidelines

Pictorials must be submitted in the TEI2024 Pictorials format (see below) and not exceed 12 pages, excluding references. Submissions will be reviewed in a double-blind process, and authors must ensure that their names and affiliations do not appear on the submission. The author and affiliation sections of the template must be left blank. In case of acceptance, authors will be asked to provide a camera-ready copy that includes this information, along with any recommended improvements as suggested by the reviewers. The first page of the submission should include the submission’s title 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. All submissions should be anonymous and submitted via the TEI2024 Precision Conference (PCS) system by 25 July 2023 (abstract and authors’ info) and 1 August 2023 (full submissions).

 

We strongly advise you to use the InDesign template to compose your Pictorial. Alternatively, the MS-Word or PowerPoint templates are also available as accessible options.

Review and Selection

Submissions will be reviewed in a double-blind process, and authors must ensure that their names and affiliations do not appear on the submitted papers. The author and affiliation sections of the template must be left blank. In case of acceptance, authors will be asked to provide a camera-ready copy that includes this information, along with any recommended improvements as suggested by the reviewers.

 

Furthermore, all references should remain intact. If you previously published a paper and your current submission builds on that work, the reference – with authors – should appear in the references. Submissions should NOT have blank references (e.g., “12. REMOVED FOR REVIEWING”). We encourage authors to refer to their previous work in the third person. Further suppression of identity in the body of the paper, while encouraged, is left to the authors’ discretion.

 

Confidentiality of submissions will be maintained during the review process. All rejected submissions will be kept confidential in perpetuity. All submitted materials for accepted submissions will be kept confidential until the start of the conference.

 

For camera-ready submissions, we will ask that all authors make their pictorials accessible by making sure the document follows best practices in accessibility. Please see the following attachment for more information: PDF accessibility guideline.

Attendance

At least one author of each accepted submission must register for the conference by the early registration deadline in order for the final paper to be published in the conference proceedings.

Previous Pictorial Examples

Pictorials from TEI 2023:

 

Pictorials from TEI 2022:

Pictorial Chairs

Samuel Huron, Institut Polytechnique de Paris, France

Zhuying Li, Southeast University, China

 

pictorial_chairs@tei.acm.org