Student Design Competition is in-person only.
Important Dates
All times are in Anywhere on Earth (AoE) time zone. When the deadline is day D, the last time to submit is when D ends AoE. Check your local time in AoE.
- Submission deadline: Thursday, January 23, 2025
- Notification: Thursday, February 20, 2025
- e-rights completion deadline: Thursday, February 27, 2025
- Publication-ready deadline: Thursday, March 6, 2025
- TAPS Closes: Thursday, March 6, 2025
Submission Details
- Online submission: PCS Submission System
- Template: ACM Master Article Submission Templates (single column)
- Submission length: Up to 8 pages long (excluding references)
- For this venue, references DO count towards page length.
- 5-minute design concept videos (check technical requirements for video content at CHI)
- Poster in one standard letter page size
- Proof of all team members’ student status
- List of up to 2 supervisors/advisors with affiliation
- Submissions are not anonymous and should include all author names, affiliations, and contact information.
Selection Process
Message from the Student Design Competition Chairs
This is the 21st year of the CHI Student Design Competition (SDC), which has grown into a premiere venue for 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 a myriad of approaches (design research, brainstorming, prototyping, implementation, and evaluation, for starters) to develop their submissions. Each year, this competition has received approximately 60 submissions from 15 countries. With your entry, we hope to grow these 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.
ACM’s Publication Policies
It is critical that authors review ACM’s publications policies. Please read this separate page for them.
Funding
Students can apply for a Gary Marsden Travel Award, independent of submitting to the Student Research Competition. Please carefully read the page linked from above because some of the deadlines for this travel award may occur before the submission deadline of SRC.
What is the Student Design Competition at CHI 2025?
The Student Design Competition is aimed at meeting three goals:
- Provide an opportunity for students from a variety of backgrounds (e.g., computer science, 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 with their peers.
- Provide an opportunity for students presenting at the design competition to meet with the CHI community, get an opportunity to network with experienced HCI and Design professionals, and build their portfolio as a designer.
- Provide CHI attendees with refreshing perspectives on how design teams from different disciplines and different parts of the world approach a common design problem.
The Design Brief: Appropriate Solutions for All
At the Student Design Competition, we ask you to contribute to one (or several) of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals identified by the United Nations:
- No Poverty
- Zero Hunger
- Good Health and Well-being
- Quality Education
- Gender Equality
- Clean Water and Sanitation
- Affordable and Clean Energy
- Decent Work and Economic Growth
- Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure
- Reduced Inequality
- Sustainable Cities and Communities
- Responsible Consumption and Production
- Climate Action
- Life Below Water
- Life on Land
- Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions
- Partnerships for the Goals
The scope of this brief is deliberately broad to provide the opportunity to participate to as many students worldwide as possible. Your solution has to be clearly linked to one (or several) of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals.
You may adopt design strategies such as participatory design, co-creation and co-design, service design, design for social innovation, inclusive design and open innovation. You may adopt 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/ Virtual Reality, to name just a few. Remember, though, that sometimes the best design solution or approach may flow from simple yet sharp insights uncovered from research, and might require only minimal technology – what is important is that your solution should be appropriate for the particular goal you are focusing on.
For this year’s design challenge, we particularly encourage that the following criteria be considered as guidelines:
- Is your design clearly linked to one of the Sustainable Development Goals?
- Does your design specify and solve a relevant and “burning” problem?
- Does your design use technology in an appropriate and novel way?
- Was the design well-crafted and effectively presented?
- Was the design validated in an appropriate and valid way to demonstrate the fulfillment of your design goal?
- Was relevant prior work properly identified and cited?/li>
- Were analysis, synthesis, design, and evaluation systematic and sufficient?
- Was the design 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)?
- Did the team explore the entire ecosystem of stakeholders, conditions, and contexts?
Student Team Requirements
Teams must consist of at least 2 and no more than 5 authors. 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 students at all stages of their university careers, from undergraduate to postgraduate level. While not a mandatory requirement, it is strongly encouraged that the teams put forward a multidisciplinary and/or multi-national team.
The author list may include their supervisors/advisors. Note that they are included for the author count limit (up to 5 authors). They cannot be presenting authors; student authors are required to give presentations at the conference to be considered for awards.
Metadata Integrity
All submission metadata, including required fields in PCS like author names, affiliations, and order, must be complete and correct by the submission deadline. This information is crucial to the integrity of the review process and author representation. The submission deadline is a hard deadline for listing all author names; there are no exceptions. Changes to the order of authors are allowed only during the Publication-Ready submission phase. Minor changes to the title and abstract are permitted during the Publication-Ready submission phase.
Policy on Use of Large Language Models
Text generated from a large-scale language model (LLM), such as ChatGPT, must be clearly marked where such tools are used for purposes beyond editing the author’s own text. Please carefully review the April 2023 ACM Policy on Authorship before you use these tools. The SIGCHI blog post describes approaches to acknowledging the use of such tools and we refer to it for guidance. Note that the LaTeX template will default to hiding the Acknowledgements section while in review mode – please make sure that any LLM disclosure is available in your submitted version. While we do not anticipate using tools on a large scale to detect LLM-generated text, we will investigate submissions brought to our attention and desk reject papers where LLM use is not clearly marked.
Policy on Research Involving Human Participants and Subjects
Any research in submitted manuscripts that involves human subjects must go through the appropriate ethics review requirements that apply to the authors’ research environment. As research environments vary considerably with regards to their requirements, authors are asked to submit a short note to reviewers that provides this context. Please also see the 2021 ACM Publications policy on research involving humans before submitting.
Accessibility
Accessible submissions are essential for reviewers and are good practice. Authors are expected to follow SIGCHI’s Guide to an Accessible Submission. If you have any questions or concerns about creating accessible submissions, please contact the Accessibility Chairs at accessibility@chi2025.acm.org early in the writing process (the closer to the deadline, the less time the team will have to respond to individual requests).
Preparing and Submitting your Student Design Competition Submission
Student Design Competition submissions must be submitted via the PCS Submission System by January 23rd, 2025. The submission must have the following four components (must be in English), and meet the accessibility requirements. If you have any questions or concerns about creating accessible submissions, please contact the Accessibility Chairs at accessibility@chi2025.acm.org.
- Paper submission: Teams will submit a non-anonymized manuscript, up to 8 pages long (including references) following the ACM Master Article Submission Templates (single column). Submissions not strictly meeting the page limit or formatting requirements will be desk rejected. This document should be submitted as a single PDF and the file must be no larger than 10 Mb in size. The Paper 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. Please refer to the guidelines above in the “The Design Brief: Appropriate Solutions for All” section.
- Acknowledgement of partial or incomplete solutions
- Acknowledgement of any assistance drawn from outside the student team (e.g., advisors, domain experts, existing solutions, users)
- Poster: The poster size should be reduced to one standard letter page and submitted in PDF format. The file must be no larger than 10 Mb in size and must include:
- Proposed solution’s name, team name, academic affiliation
- Chosen sustainable development goal(s)
- Perspective taken to address the design brief. Please refer to the guidelines above in the “The Design Brief: Appropriate Solutions for All” section.
- Concise description of the proposed solution
- Clear illustrations of key aspects of your proposed solution
- Compelling, effective visual design
- Name and affiliation of mentor/supervisor (if relevant)
- Design concept video: Teams must provide a video presentation (max 5-minute — check technical and accessibility requirements for video content at CHI), with a file-size no larger than 100Mb. The video may illustrate how your solution fits the lives of the users with the help of scenarios, or addresses human aspects of the chosen sustainable development goals. It may also illustrate some details of the interface and the information presented. The Video 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 and solves problems / engages or entertains users
- Details of the interface and information design where relevant
- Highlights of significant evaluation results
- Proof Package of Student Status: submit a single file confirming the status of each student on the team written in English.
- This can be a proof of school affiliation or a note signed by your academic supervisor or faculty member in the same institution verifying all of the following information:
- Academic affiliation
- Whether you were an undergraduate or a graduate student when the work was done
- Student status at the time of the initial submission (January 2025)
- List of supervisors/advisors with affiliation, if relevant
- Transcripts or scanned IDs will not be accepted as a proof.
- This can be a proof of school affiliation or a note signed by your academic supervisor or faculty member in the same institution verifying all of the following information:
Selection Process
Each team’s initial submission will be reviewed by both academics and practitioners.
- Short description of how your proposed design fits with this year’s design brief
- Use of appropriate design methods
- Clarity and credibility of design focus, problem, purpose, and solution relative to the chosen sustainable development goal(s)
- Originality and quality of the design solution, including claims, and their supporting evidence, based on the guidelines above in the “The Design Brief: Appropriate Solutions for All” section.
- Innovation within the design process
- Clarity of the submission and supplementary material
- Meeting the accessibility requirements
- The submitted poster will be judged based on:
- Clear communication of key aspects of problem and solution
- Clear communication of design approaches
- Clear communication of arguments for proposed solution
- Craft quality of the solution
The conference presentation will be judged based on the following:
- Clarity and organization of the oral presentation
- Relevance and clarity of presentation material (e.g., slides, video)
- Quality of argument used to justify why the solution is worthy of consideration
- Quality, originality, and relevance of design solution
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 the start of the conference, with the exception of title and author information, which will be published on the website prior to the conference.
The Competition Structure
The competition follows a three-round process. Each team’s short paper submission will be reviewed by both academic and professional design and usability experts. Each round focuses on communicating the team’s ideas through a different mode.
Round One: Paper Submission, Poster and Video (Submission deadline: Thursday, January 23, 2025)
Expert reviewers will evaluate submissions of paper, video, and poster. A maximum of 12 teams will be selected to attend the CHI conference.
All submissions must be in English and must include title and author information, including affiliations. Please ensure that submissions do not contain proprietary or confidential material and do not cite proprietary or confidential publications. Student Design Competition authors will be notified of acceptance or rejection by email along with instructions on how to submit the publication-ready version of their Paper, Poster, and Video.
Round Two: Poster Presentation (At CHI 2025 conference)
Submissions selected for round two of the competition will be evaluated during a poster session at CHI 2025. A scheduled poster presentation event will take place during the conference. At least one member of the accepted teams is expected to attend the conference to present their poster, outline their design, and discuss their proposed solution with a panel of Student Design Competition Judges. Based on the results from the poster session, the judges will select four teams to present their proposed solutions orally during a scheduled presentation session named “Student Design Competition Final”. Teams will be provided space in the convention center to display posters and discuss their proposed solutions with the CHI 2025 attendees.
Round Three: Final Presentation (At CHI 2025 conference)
The four teams selected by the judges following the Poster Presentation will present their design process and solution in a session, open to all CHI attendees pending circumstances/logistics. During this final round, students will give a short presentation of their research (more details to follow in future) followed by a question and answer period, which will be evaluated by a panel of judges.
Final 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
All finalists earn a Certificate of Recognition. The winning entry will be recognized during the closing plenary session of the CHI 2025 conference. Winners will be announced together with their mentors/supervisors during the closing plenary. In addition, all teams will be mentioned on the conference website.
Upon Acceptance of your Submission
Student Design Competition abstracts will be archived in the ACM Digital Library. Publishing in the Student Design Competition will not constrain future submissions (e.g., as a conference paper or a journal article). Your abstract and poster are not considered to be a prior publication of the work for the purposes of a future conference or journal publication.
Authors of all accepted submissions will receive instructions on how to submit the publication-ready copy of their abstract. Deadlines and instructions regarding publication-ready submissions are emailed to accepted authors. This email will also contain instructions of how to notify the Student Design Competition and Accessibility Chairs of any necessary accommodations. Authors will also receive instructions by email about poster design for presentation at the conference. If the authors are unable to meet these requirements by the Publication-Ready deadline, the venue Chairs will be notified and may be required to remove the paper from the program.
The publication-ready version has to follow the LaTeX and Word templates from ACM. Should you need technical assistance, please direct your technical query to: publications@chi2025.acm.org.
Competition Reviewers and Judges
TBD
Funding
Students can apply for a Gary Marsden Travel Award, independent of submitting to the Student Research Competition. Please carefully read the page linked from above because some of the deadlines for this travel award may occur before the submission deadline of SRC.
At the Conference
Accepted authors must participate in the competition in-person. Accordingly, a presenting author must register to the conference.
Accepted submissions will participate in an interactive poster/demo session. Four teams will then be chosen to advance to the next round which will involve giving a short presentation.
In-person attendance
The CHI 2025 Student Design Competition relies on in-person attendance, so that all students can benefit most from the experience. Accepted submissions are expected to attend CHI 2025 to participate in the Student Design Competition. If you have an exceptional circumstance which prevents your in-person attendance, please contact the Chairs.
After the Conference
Accepted submissions will appear as Extended Abstract proceedings in the ACM Digital Library.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can I submit to the Student Design Competition and submit the same work in parallel with other tracks (e.g., Late-breaking work)?
For each work, authors must choose only one track and submit their submissions to a single track. Any concurrent submissions must be declared and should follow ACM policies on Redundant Publication or Self-Plagiarism. Any duplicate submissions across tracks will be rejected.
Contact Us
Student Design Competition Chairs
Yi-Chieh (EJ) Lee, Hwajung Hong
