Student Design Competition

Quick Facts
Important Dates

■ Submission deadline: 7 January 2019, 12pm (noon) PST / 3pm EST

■ Notification deadline: 24 January 2019
■ Camera-ready deadline: 31 January 2019

Due to tight publication schedules, revisions to the submitted work will not be possible.
Your submitted PDF will be the publication-ready version. Please note that upon
acceptance authors will be required to complete the ACM rights form, fill in the copyright
information in their document, and submit their final version within 24 hours of its being
requested.

Submission Details:

■ Online Submission: PCS Submission System (PCS 2.0)

■ Template: Extended Abstracts Format
■ Submission Format: 6 page paper in Extended Abstracts
Format, a 5-minute video clip in MP4 format, a poster in one
standard letter page size, and proof of all team members’
student status.
■ For this venue, references do count towards page length.
■ Submissions are not anonymous and should include all author
names, affiliations, and contact information.

Please note: CHI 2019 is using a new version of Precision Conference System (PCS
2.0). You will need to create a new login/password for this system.

Selection process: Juried

Chairs: Roisin McNaney, Hiromi Nakamura, Nick Taylor

([email protected])

At the Conference: Accepted submissions will participate in a juried poster session. 4

teams will then be chosen to advance to the next round which will involve giving a short
presentation.
Archives: Extended Abstracts; posters; videos; ACM Digital Library.

Message from the Student Design Competition Chairs

This is the 17th year of the CHI Student Design Competition (SDC), which has grown
into a premier venue for extremely talented students to demonstrate their skills in
Interaction Design and User Experience. The SDC poses a real-world challenge and
demands that teams of students use myriad approaches (design research,
brainstorming, prototyping, implementation, and evaluation, for starters) to develop their
submissions. In previous years, there have been over 79 submissions from about 15
countries each year. With your entries, we hope to grow those numbers and increase
the quality of submissions while continuing to offer students and instructors the most
hands-on, engaging, and significant design experience we can. The competition always
draws a large audience at CHI and also serves as a fantastic opportunity to identify the
field’s most talented students.

Roisin McNaney, Bristol University, Bristol, United Kingdom

Hiromi Nakamura, National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology

(AIST), Tsukuba, Japan

Email: [email protected]

What is the Student Design Competition?

The Student Design Competition has three goals:

■ Provide an opportunity for students from a variety of design backgrounds

(HCI, industrial design, product design, visual design, interaction design,
etc.) to participate in CHI and demonstrate their problem solving and design
skills in an international competition against their peers.
■ Provide CHI attendees with refreshing perspectives on how design teams
from different disciplines and different parts of the world approach a
common design problem.
■ Provide CHI attendees with a chance to meet future professionals in our
area, and provide competition participants with an opportunity to network
with experienced HCI and Design professionals.
CHI 2019 Design Brief: Weaving the Threads within the
Social Fabric
Technology has provided numerous means through which people can connect and
create new networks, practices, and cultures. It has also provided new channels for
people to make their voices heard and shape the future. We have seen this
phenomenon accelerate over the last decade; in societies with serious political crises,
local people have been able to communicate with the world and influence opinion and
politics. Social technologies, crowdsourcing platforms, and digital fabrication have
created new opportunities for invention, business, and manufacturing to be
democratised and sharing economies to emerge. Technologies enable different
communities of interest or practice to come together to share experiences, support one
another, and to address some of the wicked problems faced by humanity.

The theme of CHI 2019 is ‘Weaving the threads’. In the Student Design Competition, we
encourage you to contribute to this theme by considering the ways that technology
might be used to strengthen our social fabric. Social fabric is a metaphor for how
individuals interact with each other within a community. Frequent and positive
interactions create a tight weave to create a strong ‘social fabric’ that can withstand the
weight of a challenge. The looser the connections a community has, the looser the
weave and the greater the likelihood that the fabric will break. The fabric can also fray if
key threads are lost, or develop loose threads if some members of the society choose a
different path (e.g. differing opinions on key politics, criminal actions). We challenge you
to consider how technology can enhance how people weave together within
communities and wider society as a whole.

The scope of this brief is broad: for example, you could focus on healthcare, ageing,
education, policy, public service, business development, charity, sustainable living, food,
energy consumption, art, or indigenous culture, just to name a few. You can either work
with an existing community, or you could aim to create a new community. The scale and
definition of a community can vary depending on your design aim, for example, people
in the same region, a group of people with the same interests, a network of people who
pursue new social or economic value, communities of practice in professional fields and
so on. You may adopt design strategies that allow community engagement, including
participatory design, co-creation and co-design, service design, design for social
innovation,inclusive design and open innovation. You may come up with a participatory
design and co-creation approach using existing technologies or you may find
opportunity in contemporary developments in technology, such as 3D printing, digital
fabrication, citizen sensing, the maker movement, the sharing economy, big data, social
networks, IoT, gamification, new sensors and actuators, and Augmented Reality, to
name just a few.

Remember, though, that sometimes the best interventions may flow from a simple yet
sharp insight gleaned from research, and might require only minimal technology – what
is important is that your choice of technology and design intervention should be
appropriate for the particular community and context you are focusing on.

For this year’s design challenge, we particularly encourage that the following criteria be
considered:

■ Does the design intervention address a real population and/or situation?

■ Does the intervention use technology in an appropriate and novel way?
■ Was relevant prior work properly identified and cited?
■ Were analysis, synthesis, design and evaluation both systematic and
sufficient?
■ Was the intervention developed far enough to demonstrate the key ideas?
■ Were genuine stakeholders involved in the process of research,
development and evaluation?
■ Were the research process and the involvement of stakeholders ethically
appropriate (e.g., were institutional guidelines followed)? Please note that
we will check submissions to ensure that ethics has been mentioned, and
we will look for confirmation that appropriate ethical approvals have been
gained where necessary (e.g. if working with children or vulnerable
communities).
■ Did the team explore the entire ecosystem of stakeholders, conditions, and
contexts?
■ Was the intervention well-crafted and effectively presented?

Student Team Requirements

Teams must consist of at least two, but no more than five students. There is no limit to
the number of teams that may compete from any given University or organization.
However, one student cannot be part of multiple teams.

Submissions are invited from all students at all stages of their university careers, from
undergraduate to postgraduate. While not a mandatory requirement, it is strongly
encouraged that the teams put forward a multidisciplinary, multi-national team.
Preparing and Submitting your Student Design
Competition Submission
Student Design Competition submissions must be submitted via the PCS Submission
System by January 7 2019 12pm (noon) PST / 3pm EST. The submission must have the
following four components:

1. Extended Abstract. Teams will submit a non-anonymized paper (6 pages

maximum) written in the Extended Abstracts Format summarizing their
design solution and its evolution. Submissions not meeting the page limit or
formatting requirements will be automatically disqualified. This document
should be submitted as a single PDF and the file must be no larger than 10
Mb in size.
2. Poster. The poster design should be reduced to one standard letter page in
size and submitted in PDF format and the file must be no larger than 10 Mb
in size.
3. Video. Teams must provide a supplementary video (MP4 file, max
5-minutes), with a file-size no larger than 100Mb, illustrating how your
solution fits the lives of the users with the help of scenarios. It may also
illustrate some details of the interface and the information presented. Please
refer to the Video Showcase section for guidelines on the video submission.
4. Proof of Student Status: submit a note signed by your academic
supervisor verifying all of the following information:
■ Your university
■ Whether you were a graduate or undergraduate when the work
was done
■ Confirmation that all members of the team are currently
registered in an academic program full-time (that at least 50% of
your working week is spent following an academic course of
study). Participants must be students pursuing an academic
degree at the time of initial submission (early 2019). Transcripts
or scanned IDs will not be accepted as a proof. All students
must provide proof of their student status by the letter
mentioned above. Each team must provide one proof package
(a single file containing scanned signed letters for each team
member) together with their project submission.
The Competition Structure
The competition follows a three-round process. Each round focuses on communicating
the team’s ideas through a different mode.

Round One: Extended Abstract, Video and Poster

Teams will submit a short paper in Extended Abstract Format (six pages maximum)
summarizing their design solution and its evolution. Teams must provide supplementary
material in form of at most 5-minute video. The video may illustrate how your solution
fits the lives of the users with the help of scenarios. It may also illustrate some details of
the interface and the information presented. Expert reviewers will evaluate submissions
and a maximum of 12 teams will be selected to attend the CHI conference.

The Extended Abstract should include:

■ A description of your chosen design focus and proposed solution, with a

summary of the approaches taken within your design process, the real life
problems that you are solving, and your main claims for your proposed
solution with evaluation results
■ Reference to design principles, sources of inspiration, and HCI theory where
appropriate and relevant
■ Acknowledgement of partial or incomplete solutions
■ Acknowledgement of any assistance drawn from outside the student team
(advisors, faculty, domain experts, existing solutions, users, etc.)

The Supplementary Video Material may include:

■ Examples of significant contextual data and its analysis (primary, secondary

research or both)
■ Key creative sources of design inspiration (existing designs and systems)
■ Sketches of the evolving solution
■ Scenarios depicting how the solution fits in the life of users
■ Details of the interface and information design where relevant
■ Highlights of significant evaluation results

All submissions must be in English and must include title and author information,
including author affiliations. Please be sure that submissions do not contain proprietary
or confidential material and do not cite proprietary or confidential publications. Due to
tight publication schedules, revisions to the extended abstract will not be possible. The
submitted PDF version should be camera-ready final version.

Round Two: Poster Presentation

Submissions selected for round two of the competition will be evaluated during a poster
session at CHI 2019. A scheduled 80-minute poster presentation event will take place
during the conference. Accepted teams are expected to attend the conference to give a
poster presentation outlining their design, and discuss their proposed solution with a
panel of Student Design Competition Judges. Based on the outcome of the poster
session, the judges will select four teams to participate in the “Student Design
Competition Final”. Teams will also be provided space in the convention center to
display posters and discuss their proposed solutions with the CHI 2019 attendees.

Specific guidelines for preparing posters:

■ Each poster will have a display space approximately 8 feet wide and 4 feet
high.
■ The poster is expected to follow the International Standards Organization
(ISO) poster size format (A0). The dimensions for A0 format are 84cm x
119cm, or approximately 33″ x 47″. Either landscape or portrait orientation is
acceptable.
■ Audiovisual and computing equipment will not be supplied. Power outlets
will not be available. The participants may include QR codes in the poster to
link to supplementary online material (such as scenario videos or interactive
prototypes).

The poster must include:

■ The proposed name of the solution, team name, and school affiliation
■ The perspective taken to address the design challenge
■ A concise description of the proposed solution
■ Clear illustrations of key aspects of the proposed solution
■ Compelling, effective visual design

Round Three: Final Presentation

The four teams selected by the judges following the Poster Presentations will present
their design process and solution during the “Student Design Competition Final”. This
session will be open to all CHI attendees. During this final round, students will have the
opportunity to give a short presentation on their research (10 minutes) followed by
questions and answers (5 minutes), which will be evaluated by a panel of judges.
Presentations must include:

■ The design process that was followed

■ A concise description of the proposed solution
■ Reference to design principles and theory where appropriate
■ Acknowledgement of partial or incomplete solutions

The top four entries to the Student Competition earn a Certificate of Recognition. The
winning entry will be recognized during the closing plenary session of the CHI 2019
conference. Winners will be announced during the closing plenary.

Student Design Competition Selection Process

Each team’s short paper submission will be reviewed by both academic and
professional design and usability experts.

Round one, the written submission, will be reviewed based on:

■ Use of appropriate design methods such as ethnography, contextual

research, phenomenological/autobiographical methods, secondary
research, reflection, critique, analysis, and empirical evaluation.
■ Clarity and credibility of design focus, purpose and solution relative to the
posed challenge.
■ Originality and quality of the design solution, including claims and their
supporting evidence.
■ Innovation within the design process.
■ Quality of design management.
■ Clarity of extended abstract and supplementary material.

Round two, the poster submission, will be judged based on:

■ Clear communication of key aspects of solution

■ Clear communication of design approaches
■ Clear communication of arguments for proposed solution
■ Craft quality of the solution

Round three, the presentation, will be judged based on:

■ Clarity and organization of the oral presentation

■ Relevance and clarity of presentation material (slides, video, etc)
 ■ Quality of argument used to justify why the solution is worthy of
consideration
■ Quality, originality and relevance of design solution

Submissions should not contain sensitive, private, or proprietary information that cannot
be disclosed at publication time. Submissions should NOT be anonymous. However,
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 they are published in the ACM Digital Library,
with the exception of title and author information which will be published on the website
prior to the conference.