IDC 2025 invites the submission of pictorials that build on the IDC 2025 theme of “Hope”. Pictorials harness the strength of visual communication by combining images, layout, and typography in innovative ways, making these elements integral to the essence of the work. Full papers and pictorials published at IDC are ACM archival publications and will be made available through the ACM in the Digital Library.
In 2022, IDC introduced the Pictorials track, building on a format first established at DIS 2014. Pictorials were designed to support the presentation and communication of research ideas, design practices, methods, provocations, insights, and contributions through a visually rich format. Since their inception, Pictorials have been successfully adopted by conferences such as DIS, C&C, and TEI. With the growing recognition and impact of Pictorials in academic settings, this call draws on previous Calls for Participation (CFPs) from DIS, C&C, and TEI. We extend our gratitude to past Pictorial chairs for their efforts in shaping Pictorials into a distinct and valuable contribution format and research output.
What are Pictorials?
Pictorials are research papers where visual elements—such as diagrams, sketches, illustrations, renderings, photographs, annotated images, and collages—serve as the primary medium for communicating ideas and research contributions, complementing the accompanying text. By harnessing the strengths of visual communication, Pictorials utilize effective visual languages and high-quality imagery to convey their message. They can encompass practical, theoretical, or a combination of both perspectives.
Pictorials provide a platform for researchers, practitioners, industry professionals, artists, designers, and students from diverse fields—such as engineering, interaction design, computer science, product design, media studies, and the arts—to explore and articulate their design practices and projects through visually rich formats. Pictorials are considered equivalent to Full Papers in all aspects, including production quality, archival standards, rigorous peer review, presentation duration, and institutional reporting.
Pictorials aim to generate new knowledge rather than simply document existing concepts, methods, or processes. The visual components themselves serve as contributions to design knowledge, functioning as a form of creation or “making.” However, these visuals must be paired with a narrative that clearly articulates the knowledge contribution, enabling the audience to engage with the work as part of a research discourse. This narrative acts as a scaffold, elevating the Pictorial to the level of research and ensuring it can be treated as a reasoned argument within academic contexts. At the same time, the textual narrative should remain a supportive framework that highlights and enhances the contribution of the visual content.
Similar to full papers, the content of your Pictorial should primarily consist of your original work. While it is acceptable to include visual materials created by others, provided they are properly attributed and used with permission, such materials should be clearly identified as references rather than forming the core of your argument. Just as a text-based paper should not be dominated by quotations from other sources, a Pictorial should not rely heavily on visual materials created by others.
That said, your Pictorial is expected to engage with and build upon the work of others with the same level of scholarly rigor and integrity as a full paper. Here are some key points to keep in mind when preparing your Pictorial:
- Does your work require a Pictorial format, or would it be clearer in a more conventional textual form?
- Is the contribution that is presented original and complete? If not, you may want to consider a WIP submission instead.
- 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?
- 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 IDC 2025 Pictorial 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 IDC community. Further written parts known from other conference formats such as Introduction, Conclusion, Discussion, and Acknowledgements are optional.
References and the “Selection and Participation of Children” are mandatory sections that do not count towards the page limit. 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 IDC2025 Precision Conference (PCS) system. Please make sure to select the IDC 2025 Pictorials track inside of PCS.
We strongly advise you to use the InDesign template to compose your Pictorial. If you do not have access to InDesign, please use the Figma, Word, or Powerpoint templates:
Important Dates (Midnight in AoE)
- January 21, 2025: Abstracts due
- January 28, 2025: Full submissions due
- March 25, 2025: Author notifications
- April 23, 2025: Publication-ready submissions due
- June 23-26, 2025: IDC Conference
Review and Selection
Submissions for review should be anonymized according to the CHI Anonymization Policy. Specifically, authors MUST remove their names and institutions from the manuscript heading, and they MUST NOT remove citations to their prior work. We encourage authors to refer to their previous work in the third person. We also encourage suppression of identity in the body of the paper. Submissions that are not anonymized, do not follow the length guidelines or are not in English will be desk-rejected. Submissions will go through a double-anonymous, peer review process. Once accepted for publication, a light second review process might be needed. 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. Accepted IDC Pictorials will be distributed by the conference and 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 submissions to conference attendees.
Example Pictorials
For reference, here are some examples of pictorials from IDC 2023 and 2024:
Sylla, CM, Gil, M., Menegazzi, D., Landoni. M. 2024. Evaluating Children’s Engagement with Technology Through the Lens of the Grammar of Visual Design. In Interaction Design and Children (IDC ’24). ACM, 189–200. https://doi.org/10.1145/3628516.3656273
Fernandez, C., Blikstein, P., Lopes, R. 2024. Design failures in data visualization programming activities. In Interaction Design and Children (IDC ’24). ACM, 574–586. https://doi.org/10.1145/3628516.3663348
Hunt, C. L., Sun, K., Tseng, K., Balasubramaniyam, P., Druin, A., Huynh, A., Leithinger, D., & Yip, J. (2024). Making a Metaphor Sandwich: Analyzing Children’s use of Metaphor During Tabletop Telepresence Robot Supported Participatory Design. In Interaction Design and Children (IDC ’24). ACM, 173-188. https://doi.org/10.1145/3628516.3656272
Oralbayeva, N., Zhanatkyzy, A., Amir, A., Telisheva, Z., & Sandygulova, A. (2024). Moveable Alipbi: A Montessori-inspired Design of Long-Term Child-Robot Interaction for Early Literacy Development. In Interaction Design and Children (IDC ’24). ACM,, 587–599. https://doi.org/10.1145/3628516.3663347
Ricarose Roque and Mariana Aki Tamashiro. 2022. Making Learning Visible in Constructionist Learning Contexts. In Interaction Design and Children (IDC ’22). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 69–81. https://doi.org/10.1145/3501712.3534093
ACM Guidelines
By submitting your article to an ACM Publication, you are hereby acknowledging that you and your co-authors are subject to all ACM Publications Policies, including ACM’s new Publications Policy on Research Involving Human Participants and Subjects. Alleged violations of this policy or any ACM Publications Policy will be investigated by ACM and may result in a full retraction of your paper, in addition to other potential penalties, as per ACM Publications Policy.
Please ensure that you and your co-authors obtain an ORCID ID, so you can complete the publishing process for your accepted paper. ACM has been involved in ORCID from the start and we have recently made a commitment to collect ORCID IDs from all of our published authors. We are committed to improve author discoverability, ensure proper attribution and contribute to ongoing community efforts around name normalization; your ORCID ID will help in these efforts.