Our first PhD grad, Eli Blevis, discusses Picturing Human-Computer Interaction Design in our 50th Anniversary Distinguished Speaker Series.

The idea of privileging visual materials in archival contributions in HCI has achieved a certain traction over the past near decade. This has been a major focus of my own work, and the work of several others. I believe that HCI is a design-oriented discipline. As such, it is incumbent on the field to accept scholarly forms of communication that have foundations in design. Visual acumen is a foundation of design.

This traction takes two forms. One form is pictorials. Pictorials are nowadays a form of archival—double blind peer reviewed—contribution at ACM conferences, beginning with ACM Design Interactive Systems (DIS) since 2014, and now including ACM Creativity & Cognition (C&C) since 2017, as well as ACM Tangible and Embedded Interactions (TEI) beginning in 2020. Another form is traditional papers which push at the boundaries by including and privileging more visual materials than usual. These have appeared at ACM Computer-Human Interaction (CHI) in addition to these other venues.