Call for Papers and Notes

ACM SIGCHI Designing Interactive Systems, 4-8 June 2016, Brisbane, Australia

The ACM SIGCHI Conference on Designing Interactive Systems (DIS) is the premier international arena where designers, artists, psychologists, user experience researchers, and systems engineers come together to debate and shape the future of interactive systems design and practice.

The theme of the conference is “fuse.” The joining of human and computer, body and technology, bits and atoms, art and design, academy and industry, and of north and south – these are important themes in modern-day interaction design, and hence the focus of this year’s conference. Fuse is an active verb that goes beyond the dialectic of interaction and speaks to the merging of entities and the emergence of something new and whole. We are interested in the strong connections designers have to their work, that people have to personal systems, and that we all have to one another. At the same time, fuse is a noun, a bridge in the system that is meant to protect us from harm. We should think not only of strength and disruption, but of fragility and responsibility, and how small acts of design can make an enormous difference.

DIS 2016 will be held in the beautiful, subtropical city of Brisbane in Queensland, Australia. DIS 2016 will be hosted by Queensland University of Technology surrounding one of the world’s largest digital interactive and learning environments in the new $230 million Science and Engineering Centre.

There are three reasons to visit Australia in 2016 with DIS being held back to back with the Vivid Light, Music & Ideas Festival 2016 and the Media Architecture Biennale (MAB) from 1-4 June 2016 in Sydney.

DIS 2016 centres on designerly approaches to creating, deploying and critically reflecting on interactive systems. It is an interdisciplinary conference that encompasses how such systems are built, introduced and employed in a wide variety of socio-cultural contexts. We welcome a broad engagement with the field by inviting submissions that consider the following, from a diverse range of researchers and practitioners within the field of interactive systems design:

  • Design Methods and Processes: Methods, tools, and techniques for engaging people; researching, designing, and co-designing interactive systems; participatory design, design artefacts, research through design; documenting and reflecting on design processes.
  • Experience: Places, temporality, people, communities, events, phenomena, aesthetics, user experience, usability, engagement, empowerment, wellbeing, designing things that matter, diversity, participation, materiality, making, etc.
  • Application Domains: Health, ICT4D, children-computer interaction, sustainability, games/entertainment computing, digital arts, etc.
  • Technological Innovation (systems, tools, and/or artifact designs): Sensors and actuators, mobile devices, multi touch and touchless interaction, social media, personal, community, and public displays

We welcome and encourage theoretical contributions to DIS 2016. Rather than its own subcommittee, please consider submitting theory contributions to any of the above four subcommittees.

Papers and Notes accepted for presentation at DIS 2016 are published by the ACM in the Digital Library and have in the past attracted high impact, visibility and citations.

 

IMPORTANT DATES

  • January 10, 2016: Papers, Notes, Pictorials notice of intent^ due
  • January 17, 2016: Papers, Notes, Pictorials full submission due
  • January 17, 2016: Workshop proposals due
  • March 7, 2016: Papers, Notes, Pictorials author notifications
  • March 13, 2016: Provocations & Works-in-Progress, Demos, Design Works, Doctoral Consortium applications due
  • March 27, 2016: Provocations & Works-in-Progress, Demos, Design Works, Doctoral Consortium author notifications
  • April 1, 2016: All camera ready papers due
  • May 8, 2016: Early bird registration deadline

 

Preparing and Submitting Your Paper or Note

Formatting and Length

All submissions should be formatted using the SIGCHI Conference Publications Format. Please use the most recent SIGCHI Papers template in either Word or LaTeX format. Papers should be no longer than 10 pages, while Notes should be no longer than 4 pages. This includes all figures, tables, appendices, and an abstract of less than 150 words. References do not count towards the page limits. Submissions that are over the required length will be rejected.

All Papers and Notes must present original, unpublished research. Papers and Notes are not allowed to be under concurrent review with other conferences, journals, or venues.

When considering whether to write a Paper or Note, please think about the breadth of contribution that your work presents to the field. Both Papers and Notes should be substantial contributions. A Paper allows authors with particularly novel or high-impact work to outline new approaches, philosophies, or findings in greater depth. A Note allows work that is significant and novel but incremental to be added to the field.

 

Anonymity

Both Papers and Notes should be anonymised for blind peer review. Authors are expected to remove author and institutional identity from the title and header of the paper, as well as any information embedded within the meta-data of the submission file. Suppression of identity in the body of the paper is left up to the discretion of authors. However, reviewers must be able to compare your current submission to other related work in the area. In many situations, this is the author’s own work found in other papers. We ask that if you are citing your own work, that you refer to it in the third person as opposed to removing it completely because of blind review. For example, rather than stating, “This study builds on our prior work [removed for anonymity],” please refer to it in the third person, such as, “This study builds on prior work by <authors, where you list your names> [2].”

 

Submission

^ You must submit your Notice of Intent (NOI) to submit a Paper, Note or Pictorial to the PCS submission system by 10 Jan 2016. The NOI is an entry in PCS with tentative author names, title and abstract. You can make changes as many times as you like before the final submission deadline of 17 Jan 2016. Note that this represents a compromise between the tight review schedule this year and the submission deadline being close to the public holidays. There will be no further extensions!

As part of the submission process, authors must submit an abstract, keywords, and meta-data related to the submission’s contents. Authors will also be asked to select a ranked list of between one and three themes that fit their paper. Themes include the following:

  • Design Theory, Methods, and Critical Perspectives
  • Experience
  • Application Domains
  • Technological Innovation

Details for each theme are listed above in the Call for Papers. Theme selection will be used to assign your Paper or Note to one of the review subcommittees.

 

Review Process

Papers and Notes follow the same rigorous blind peer review process. This process is managed by the Technical Program Chairs (TPC), the Subcommittee Chairs (SCs) for each theme, and Associate Chairs (ACs). Confidentiality of submissions is maintained throughout the review process.

  1. After the submission deadline, each paper will be assigned to a subcommittee based on the themes selected during the PCS submission process, and at the discretion of the program chairs.
  2. SCs will then assign each paper to a primary AC (1AC) as well as a secondary AC (2AC). Each AC will find one external reviewer for each of their assigned papers. Thus, each paper will be assigned two ACs (one 1AC and one 2AC) along with two external reviewers. As part of this process, we strive to find ACs and reviewers who are experts in the topic area of each submission.
  3. During the review period, external reviewers will write a detailed review of their assigned papers and assess the contribution of the research to the field. The 2AC will also write a detailed review of their assigned papers. Thus, each submitted paper will receive three detailed reviews in total.
  4. After the reviews have been written, the 1AC for a paper will write a meta review of the paper that summarises the reviews from the two external reviewers and the 2AC. The 1AC will then present a recommendation for the paper’s acceptance or rejection to the SC responsible for the paper.
  5. SCs will review the scores and meta reviews for each of their assigned papers and make preliminary decisions, at the recommendation of the 1ACs.
  6. SCs will meet at an in-person program committee meeting with the TPC to discuss the final acceptance of papers for inclusion in the DIS 2016 program.

 

Upon Acceptance of Your Paper or Note

Authors will be notified of conditional acceptance or rejection of their Paper or Note on or before the notification date of 7 March 2015. Meta reviews will describe any further changes that the authors are expected to make to the paper prior to its publication. These should be made as part of a “camera ready submission” into PCS by the deadline of 1 April 2015. Final changes will be checked by members of the program committee prior to making a final acceptance of the paper. If authors are unable to meet the requirements for changes, the program chairs will be notified and may reject the paper.

All accepted submissions require a signed form assigning copyright or licence to the ACM, or an upfront fee to ACM to enable Open Access. Responsibility for obtaining permissions to use video, audio, or pictures of identifiable people or proprietary content rests with the author, not the ACM or the DIS conference.

Additionally, each accepted submission requires a full conference registration fee to be paid, unless the person presenting the Paper or Note is a first-author student, in which case, a student registration fee has to be paid.

All published papers will appear online in the ACM Digital Library and be distributed digitally to conference delegates as part of the conference proceedings.

At the conference, authors of accepted papers must be in attendance to present their papers and answer questions from the audience. Presenters of Papers have a 20-minute slot including questions, and presenters of Notes have a 10-minute slot including questions. Papers and Notes whose authors are not at the conference to present may be removed from the ACM Digital Library and the conference proceedings.

 

Technical Program Chairs

Wendy Ju
Stanford University, United States

Stephen Viller
University of Queensland, Australia

Ronald Schroeter
Queensland University of Technology, Australia

program [AT] dis2016.org

Important Dates
Open PCS