ACM DIS2023

Taking place in person and at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA, 10-14th July 2023

We invite you to submit to ACM Designing Interactive Systems (DIS) 2023. The conference chairs are Nik Martelaro and Daragh Byrne (Carnegie Mellon University). Our technical program committee includes Sarah Fox (Carnegie Mellon University), Sarah Fdili Alaoui (LISN-Université Paris Saclay), Cayley MacArthur (University of Waterloo), Andy Boucher (Northumbria University), David Chatting (Goldsmiths, University of London), and Iohanna Nicenboim (Delft University of Technology).

Attending DIS2023

A summary and searchable version of DIS 2023 Program is available online with a summary. Information on attending DIS in person and remote is now online. Registration for DIS 2023 is open. Visit the registration page for details.

Important Dates:

Papers and Pictorials deadline:	Abstract 2 February 2023 Final paper 9 February 13 February 2023
Workshop Proposals deadline	23 February 2023
Work in Progress/Provocations, Demo, Doctoral Consortium deadlines	17 March, 2023
Arts Exhibition deadline: extended	12 April 2023

About the Conference

The ACM SIGCHI Conference on Designing Interactive Systems (DIS) is the premier international arena where designers, artists, psychologists, user experience researchers, systems engineers, and many more, come together to debate and shape the future of interactive systems design and practice. DIS is ranked 12th in HCI on Google Scholar and a Tier A publication venue, partly due to an average acceptance rate of 25% over the years.

Note from the Chairs

We are delighted that DIS 2023 will return to in-person conference programming and will be hosted by Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA. For those who cannot attend in person, there will be opportunities to present online and engage with conference goers.

After three years of online programming, Pittsburgh is an ideal city to host our return to in-person conference experiences. Pittsburgh has a long history of reinvention, revival, and resilience. Once the largest steel producing region in the world, it is now a booming hub for AI, automation, creativity, and culture. Pittsburgh has reinvented itself through investments in education, health care, technology and advanced manufacturing alongside huge investments into cultural institutions such as the Carnegie Museum of Art and the Andy Warhol Museum. Additionally, Carnegie Mellon – the host institution — stands at the intersection of technology, design, art, creativity, and innovation. The city offers an excellent backdrop for discussions around technology, design and art.

With the return to an in-person conference, we are also excited that many tracks, formats, and experiences that have been missing from DIS during the pandemic will return. This year, we’ll reintroduce demos, works in progress, and an arts exhibition to make place in the program to showcase emerging ideas, processes, and expressions. Two days of workshops will also precede the main three-day conference. This — along with the reintroduction of panels and evening events — we hope will create rich space for conversation, provocation, and debate about the design, research and practice for interactive systems. 

We are looking forward to seeing you in Pittsburgh in Summer 2023, 

Nik and Daragh

DIS 2023 Theme: Resilience

“Everything is chaos and always becoming, The only thing that we know is that it will always change.”

In recent years, we have been forcefully reminded of the importance of resilient design and resilient systems. Between pandemics, changing climates, and local and global upheavals, events have led many in the design world to reconsider how robust the things we are designing really are and how robust they could be. Despite recognition of how important resilience is to society, systems, and interactions, achieving this in practice requires many new and alternative ways of thinking and rethinking, knowing and unknowing, making and unmaking. 

Resilience is at once about flexibility, durability, and strength as well as a sense of mutuality and hope where solidaristic modes of engagement make new kinds of worlds possible. 

This also recognizes that resilience takes many forms in design discourse, ranging across: indigenous knowledge, more-than-human perspectives, and the relationship between human, material and artificial intelligences.  For example, resilience in products asks what endures and invites examination of adaptability, as well as material concerns towards sustainability. Similarly, resilience in systems requires us to consider both recovering from breakdowns, as well as the harm, abuse, exploitation, and bias that can exist in systems today. 

Many questions remain unanswered. How do we deal with designing in an uncertain world? When do we design for and when do we design with things breaking down and wearing out? How do we design for systems that end? How do we design systems that change over time?  When do we, and when should we, rebuild things that aren’t resilient? 

With these questions in mind, we encourage submissions that critique, resist, and/or reimagine taken-for-granted forms of resilience in interactive design research and practices, as well as those that present creative and provocative interactive systems to extend how we think about design.