Pictorials


PICTORIALS

Important Dates

Title and Abstract submission deadline: January 30, 2025
Pictorials submission deadline: February 6, 2025
Notifications: March 20, 2025
Camera-ready completion deadline: April 17, 2025

Deadlines specified as Anywhere on Earth time.

Pictorial Chairs

Alwin de Rooij, Tilburg University & Avans University of Applied Sciences
Mafalda Gamboa, Chalmers University of Technology
Andrew Webb, Louisiana State University

Contact: pictorials2025@cc.acm.org

Program Committee

To be confirmed

Pictorials

In 2025, C&C will take place online in Gather Town. The visual nature of pictorials provides an excellent opportunity to address this year’s overall conference theme of Creativity and Change.

We invite pictorial submissions that interpret this theme broadly, push the boundaries of the visual format, and exhibit professional quality in every detail.

At C&C in particular, pictorials are presented and archived as equivalent to full papers. The pictorials track at C&C operates like a specialized subcommittee of the full papers track. Authors will present their work in the sessions together with the papers track.

Additionally, we will create a gallery in the Gather venue for displaying pictorials for attendees to view.

Accepted pictorials will be expected to have at least one author register, attend, and present the work at the online conference in June 2025. Accepted pictorials will be included in the Proceedings of Creativity and Cognition 2025 and will be made available in the ACM Digital Library.

Themes

Pictorials are a format in line with this year’s conference theme, Creativity for Change, pictorials are an academic format open to change in ways of knowing, giving the opportunity to emphasize visual materials.

Pictorials challenge the primacy of text as the only form of academic research and knowledge dissemination. Our format encourages positive change toward the inclusion of submissions from practitioners, community researchers, artists, activists, and others.

To encourage change is to be open to doing research otherwise, hence we welcome submissions that challenge the edges of the C&C research community, such as those that provide insight into aspects of creativity from artistic, design, cognitive, and socio-cultural perspectives.

For more details on general topics for the conference, visit https://cc.acm.org/2025/

If you are unsure about whether your topic or pictorial format suits the C&C ’25 pictorial track, feel free to contact us at: pictorials2025@cc.acm.org

Format

Pictorials must be submitted using the C&C 2025 Pictorials templates (below) and not exceed 12 pages, excluding references. On the first page of the submission please keep with the template and 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 C&C community.

All the other pages are up to your imagination! Further written parts known from other conference formats (such as Introduction, Conclusion, and Discussion) are optional. The main part of the submission should be an annotated visual composition, and we favor submissions to use the format creatively – we encourage change. The templates do not themselves include any example images nor a variety of layout suggestions to support the authors in exploring the boundaries of the form. The pictorial form requires that the visual materials are primary. Please see the lists of published pictorials below for a starting point.

PCS allows file sizes up to about 100 MB, but we suggest that you keep reviewers in mind and experiment with lower resolution to make the submission considerably smaller.

We offer an InDesign template to compose your Pictorial. If you do not have access to InDesign, please use the Word or PowerPoint templates.

The Templates for 2025

Templates for C&C 2025:

Many thanks to Sabrina Hauser for her work on these templates over the years.

Anonymization Policy

All pictorials must be anonymized for review. Author and affiliation sections and credits must be left blank upon first submission. Ensure that no description that can easily reveal authors’ names, affiliations, project partners, or grant information is included in the submission. This also includes removing identifying information from the document’s meta-data, acknowledgments, and other sections that might threaten the blind reviewing process. Also, take care to check detailed descriptions of where studies were conducted.

Authors of accepted submissions will add identifying information in the “camera-ready” version.

Further suppression of identity in the body of the pictorial is left to the authors’ discretion. Authors should not remove references to their previous work so that reviewers can ensure that all previous research has been taken into account by the authors. Rather, authors are required to cite their own work in the third person. For example, avoid “As described in our previous work [13], …” and use instead “As described by Jones & Maiden [13], …”

C&C relies on double-blind reviewing, where neither authors nor external reviewers know each other’s identities. Note, however, that when authors publicly share their submissions in public pre-print archives, reviewers may be able to learn the authors’ identities. While publication in such public archives is not discouraged, a potential downside is that it can inadvertently complicate maintaining full anonymity during the review process.

Important Notes on Format – Please Read Carefully

Pictorials must be submitted as camera-ready as these will not be managed by the standard TAPS or other existing systems, and only minor changes (typos, postscript errors, etc.) may be made after acceptance.

For a pictorial submission, it is important to recognize that the image should be centered and celebrated: we are positioned to make the most of the visual image and its inherent storytelling. This is not to say that text is discouraged, but the primary aim of this format is to provide a venue for researchers and practitioners whose outputs may not fit the traditional “mode” of textual paper outputs. In essence – we are de-centering text.

For your pictorial submission, please only use the three formats we offer here (InDesign, Word, and Powerpoint) – otherwise your pictorial may not be considered. Other programs can make editing difficult and file size can become a problem (e.g. Figma). If you have valid reasons why these formats are not possible, please contact the chairs in advance to discuss alternatives.

Important Note on Accessibility

Although the general instructions for ACM papers have changed over the years, pictorials continue in the landscape format that has been developed for them. The templates above are the same as those introduced for DIS 2020 pictorials, except with the headers changed. One of the primary reasons that ACM is moving to a new publications workflow for papers is accessibility. Pictorials authors are required to be sure that they produce accessible work. Please be sure that “Enable Accessibility and Reflow with tagged Adobe PDF” is checked when you create your PDF submissions file. Please be sure that all images have correct associated Alt Text. Please see:

Instructions for InDesign

(https://www.adobe.com/accessibility/products/indesign/alt-text.html)

Instructions for Word or PowerPoint

(https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/add-alternative-text-to-a-shape-picture-chart-smartart-graphic-or-other-object-44989b2a-903c-4d9a-b742-6a75b451c669)

Where to Submit

Please submit via the Precision Conference (PCS) website below:

https://new.precisionconference.com/submissions

Once you have logged into the PCS website, select the following options (which will become available early next year) under “Submissions” and click the Go button.

Society: SIGCHI

Conference/Journal: Creativity & Cognition 2025

Track: Creativity & Cognition 2025 Pictorials

Questions

pictorials2025@cc.acm.org

Review and Selection

Double blind-review submissions are juried by the C&C ’25 Pictorials program committee, recruited from academia and industry by the chairs of the venue. Accepted C&C 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 online and will be assigned a time and location to present accepted submissions to conference attendees.

Additional Information

Pictorials are papers in which the visual components (e.g. annotated photographs, Artwork, collages, diagrams, field notes, illustrations, photographs, renderings, sketches) are the primary means of conveying information with at least, if not more, importance as the accompanying text.

Pictorials are part of the technical program. Pictorials are equivalent contributions to Full Papers in every way (e.g. production standards, archival qualities, reviewing standards, presentation times, institutional reporting). The differences are in the format.

Like full papers, the possibilities of content and approach for pictorials are broad. They may be reporting —for example—research through design, ethnography, empirical work, theoretical work, or thoughtful essays on the role of creativity, cognition, and design in the world. That is, the possible approaches to pictorials are as varied as the possible approaches to full papers. Success is a matter of quality and contribution of knowledge—broadly defined—to the field, rather than approach.

Like full papers, the content of your pictorial is expected to be your own original work for the most part. While it is perfectly fine to include some visual materials created by others with attributions and permissions, such materials must be clearly marked as reference rather than the main argument. Just as you would not write a text-oriented paper that consists mostly of quotes from others, your pictorial must not rely too much on visual materials created by others. On the other hand, your pictorial is expected to reference and build on the work of others with the same scholarly integrity as a full paper.

Pictorials differ from full papers in form only. They are 12 pages not including references in a purpose-designed landscape format. Production values matter more. They should be at most half text, and it is theoretically possible that a pictorial may have no text at all outside of the front matter and references. A pictorial that is more than half text is likely better submitted as a paper. Pictorials are an opportunity to report and showcase primarily original visual forms and insights with the same contribution potentials as other archival forms.

We encourage authors to be creative with their submissions and to compose highly visual submissions, which could consist of but are not limited to annotated photographs, Artwork, collages, diagrams, field notes, illustrations, photographs, renderings, and sketches.

Previous Examples

Pictorials from C&C 2023 Examples:

Kelly Homan, Robert Sproull, and David Smith. 2023. Organic Abstractions: An Exploration of Space Through Multiple Mediums. In Creativity and Cognition (C&C ’23). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 429–440. https://doi.org/10.1145/3591196.3593368

Léa Paymal and Sarah Fdili Alaoui. 2023. Physicalizing loops. In Creativity and Cognition (C&C ’23). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 465–477. https://doi.org/10.1145/3591196.3593365

Pictorials from C&C 2022 Examples:

Mafalda Gamboa. 2022. Conversations with Myself: Sketching Workshop Experiences in Design Epistemology. In Creativity and Cognition (C&C ’22). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 71–82. https://doi.org/10.1145/3527927.3531450

Gopinaath Kannabiran and Anuradha Venugopal Reddy. 2022. Exploring Kolam As An Ecofeminist Computational Art Practice. In Creativity and Cognition (C&C ’22). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 336–349. https://doi.org/10.1145/3527927.3531452

Pictorials from C&C 2021 Examples:

Paulina Yurman. 2021. Fluid Speculations: Drawing Artefacts in Watercolour as Experimentation in Research Through Design. In Creativity and Cognition (C&C ’21). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 38, 1. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3450741.3466777

Shunying An Blevis, Eli Blevis, and Bonnie Nardi. 2019. All the Tea in China: Interaction Design Inspirations. In Proceedings of the 2019 on Creativity and Cognition (C&C ’19). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 333–345. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3325480.3326569

William Odom, Ishac Bertran, Garnet Hertz, Henry Lin, Amy Yo Sue Chen, Matt Harkness, and Ron Wakkary. 2019. Unpacking the Thinking and Making Behind a Slow Technology Research Product with Slow Game. In Proceedings of the 2019 on Creativity and Cognition (C&C ’19). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 15–28. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3325480.3326567

For some examples of how to work with visual knowledge:

John Bowers. 2012. The logic of annotated portfolios: communicating the value of “research through design.” In Proceedings of the Designing Interactive Systems Conference (DIS ’12). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 68–77. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/2317956.2317968

Eli Blevis. 2011. Digital imagery as meaning and form in HCI and design: an introduction to the Visual Thinking Backpage Gallery. interactions 18, 5 (September 2011), 60–65. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/2008176.2008190

Bill Gaver and John Bowers. 2012. Annotated portfolios. interactions 19, 4 (July 2012), 40–49. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/2212877.2212889

Eli Blevis, Sabrina Hauser, and William Odom. 2015. Sharing the hidden treasure in pictorials. interactions 22, 3 (April 2015), 32–43. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/2755534

Publications Policy

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. https://www.acm.org/publications/policies/research-involving-human-participants-and-subjects.

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. The collection process has started and will roll out as a requirement throughout 2022. 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.

At least one author of an accepted pictorial must register for the conference and present the work at the conference. Otherwise, the pictorial will not be published in the ACM digital library.