ACM Designing Interactive Systems 2026

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Papers

Call For Submissions

We are pleased to invite submissions for papers to the 2026 ACM SIGCHI Conference on Designing Interactive Systems (DIS). We encourage all submissions that address one of our five contribution areas, which are also the paper subcommittees: see DIS 2026 Subcommittee Details.

Accepted papers will be included in the Proceedings of Designing Interactive Systems 2026 and will become available in ACM Digital Library.

Important Dates

Submission Site Opens15 December 2025
Title and Abstract9 January 2026
Paper and Pictorial Submission19 January 2026
Acceptance Notification1 8 March 2026
DIS 2026 Conference13 – 17 June 2026
Deadlines are specified as Anywhere on Earth time

DIS 2026 will be an in-person-only event, and authors must present their work in person. Presenting online or with a video will not be possible. Accepted papers whose authors do not present may have their paper withdrawn from the ACM Digital Library. We encourage you to ensure you can make it to Singapore between the 13 and 17 of June 2026 before you submit to DIS’26.

Preparing Your Submission

Please submit papers as PDFs through the Precision Conference Submission Portal.

As part of the submission process, authors must submit an abstract, keywords, author list, and meta-data related to the submission’s contents by 9th January 2026. Authors will also identify one or two contribution areas that fit their submitted paper. This information will be used to assign your paper to one of the subcommittees.

Paper Length and Format

Papers do not have a page limit. Authors are instead encouraged to submit a paper with a length proportional to its contribution. The length of typical submissions is expected to be approximately 7,000–8,000 words excluding references, figure/table captions, and appendices. Submissions above 12,000 words or below 4,000 words will be considered for desk rejection.
It is important that your submission is formatted correctly. Incorrectly formatted submissions might be rejected.
Templates are available for several platforms:

  • Microsoft Word
  • LaTeX (Use sample-manuscript.tex for submissions)
  • Overleaf (Latex) (or search for ACM Conference Proceedings Primary Article)
    First, authors prepare their manuscript in the designated single-column format in PDF using LaTeX or Microsoft Word. For an anonymous submission, LaTeX users should use \documentclass[manuscript,review,anonymous]{acmart} to anonymize the author list in their submission. Reviewers will review the papers in the single-column format.
    Upon conditional acceptance of an article, authors revise the manuscript and submit publication-ready source files to PCS. The ACM workflow requests authors to produce final publications (PDF and HTML5) by themselves using the TAPS production workflow.

Citation Style

Authors can find the guidance for citation style at the following link: ACM Reference Formatting.

Policies

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. Alleged violations of this policy or any ACM Publications Policies 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.

Anonymization Policy

All submissions must be anonymized for review. Author and affiliation sections and credits must be made anonymous or left blank. Authors of accepted submissions may add this information in preparation of the “camera-ready” version. We build upon the ACM CHI Anonymization Policy of reviewing, but use a relaxed model that does not attempt to conceal all traces of identity from the body of the paper.

Authors are expected to remove author and institutional identities from the title and header areas of the paper (Note: changing the text color of the author information to white is not sufficient). Authors should ensure that no description that can easily reveal authors’ names and/or affiliations is included in the submission (e.g., too detailed descriptions of where user studies were conducted). Also, please make sure that identifying information does not appear in the document’s meta-data (e.g., the ‘Authors’ field in your word processor’s ‘Save As’ dialog box). The acknowledgments section should be left blank as it could also easily identify the authors and/or their institution. Please note that images need to be anonymized for review too, for example by blurring or covering parts that would reveal author or institutional identities (e.g., faces, logos, etc.).

Further suppression of identity in the body of the submission is left to the authors’ discretion. We expect that authors leave citations to their previous work unanonymized so that reviewers can ensure that previous research has been taken into account by the authors. However, authors are required to cite their own work in the third person, e.g., avoid “As described in our previous work [10], …” and use instead “As described by Jones et al. [10], …”

In order to ensure the fairness of the reviewing process, DIS uses “double blind” anonymous reviews, where external reviewers do not know the identity of authors, and authors do not know the identity of external reviewers.

In recent years, some authors have chosen to publish their DIS submissions in public archives prior to or during the review process. DIS does not discourage this type of non-archival publication; authors should understand that complete anonymization is difficult with such non-archival publication during the review process. The consequence is that external reviewers may be able to identify authors of a submission they are reviewing. Authors should be aware that unconscious biases can affect the nature of reviews when identities are known.

Authors should notify the paper chairs if they encounter issues regarding anonymizing their work according to the instructions above. Submissions that breach the anonymization policy, without prior discussion with the paper chairs, risk desk rejection.

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 ACM Policy on Authorship (updated September 16, 2025) 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. Submissions that breach the ACM Policy on Authorship risk desk rejection. Submissions that cite literature that does not exist will be desk rejected.

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 regard to their requirements, authors will submit a short note to reviewers that provides this context. Please also see the 2021 ACM Publications policy on research involving humans before submitting.

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Review Process

Papers submitted to DIS 2026 are reviewed by one of five paper subcommittees representing the contribution areas. Each subcommittee is composed of Associate Chairs (AC) that collectively represent expertise within the contribution area.
Reviewers will use below questions to assess submissions. We provide them here for authors to consider before submitting their work.

  • Does the submission make a contribution to DIS/HCI communities (and beyond) and state its contribution clearly?
  • Is the submission well-situated, framed and well referenced within DIS and HCI especially, and outside of HCI where needed?
  • Are the implications for HCI and/or interaction design clear? These may be analytic, generative, synthesis-oriented, and even manifestos.

Process

  1. After the submission deadline, each paper will be assigned to a subcommittee in consultation with the Subcommittee Chairs (SC), and at the discretion of the technical program chairs.
  2. Each paper will be assigned to a primary AC (1AC) and a secondary AC (2AC), as well as two external reviewers. Each external reviewer and the 2AC will be blind with regard to the authors’ identity. They will each write a detailed review for the paper, and assess its contribution to the field. Thus, each paper will receive 3 detailed reviews. As part of this process, we will strive to find ACs and reviewers who are experts in the topic area of each submission.
  3. The 1AC will examine the paper and the detailed reviews, facilitate discussions among the review panel if required, and write a meta-review of the paper that summarizes the three detailed reviews.
  4. SCs and ACs will meet at a virtual program committee meeting with the technical program chairs to discuss the final acceptance of papers for inclusion in the program. At this meeting, the 1AC will present a recommendation for the paper’s acceptance or rejection.
This is a flowchart of the paper submission process. The main flow starts with authors submitting papers. Papers submitted will be checked by the paper chairs, subcommittee chairs, and associate chairs. Cases for desk rejection are considered by all chairs, while cases for assisted desk rejection are considered by subcommittee chairs and associate chairs only. In the case of an assisted desk reject, 1AC writes a meta review for the work. All other papers go through the full review process. Reviewers are invited to review the paper and each paper is discussed by associate chairs and reviewers, as well as during the subcommittee meeting. Authors receive the full set of reviews at the end of this process.
Figure 1. Flowchart showing the review process across authors, papers chairs, subcommittee chairs, associate chairs, and reviewers.

Desk Rejection

Work that falls into one of the categories below will be desk rejected.

The desk reject categories are:

  • Incomplete submissions. For example, this includes submissions with placeholder titles and/or abstracts at the abstract/metadata submission deadline, as well as papers that end abruptly and are obviously incomplete.
  • The paper does not follow
  • the anonymization policy.
  • Failure to declare concurrent submissions that are closely related.
    • If you have such a submission, you must include an anonymized version of that submission as a concurrent submission within PCS. The same rule applies if your submission is built directly on a project described in a paper that is currently under review or in press at other venues.
  • Use of wrong submission formats.
    • Note that DIS uses the single-column format of the ACM Primary Article Templates. Any submissions with other templates, including double-column and extended abstracts, will be desk rejected.
  • Clearly out of scope for the conference (e.g., formal methods for interstellar microcontrollers).
  • Miscellaneous reasons as follow:
    • Not written in English.
    • Obviously not a conference paper (e.g., patent disclosure, popular press article, a complete book, phd thesis, undergraduate report).
    • Paper that violates ACM policy on Plagiarism.
    • Paper that violates DIS policy on LLM use.

Desk-rejected submissions will not be assigned to reviewers, and their authors will receive a brief note about the rejection.

Desk Rejection Process

  1. SCs check papers for DR. For papers that fit the regular DR criteria and would not need AC input, SCs will submit the DR decisions to the Paper Chairs at this point.
  2. 1AC checks their assigned papers for further DR decisions that were missed by SCs. These are raised to the SCs.
  3. For the regular DR papers, authors will receive a brief justification from the SCs, as in the past years.

Assisted Desk Rejection

To reduce overall review workload and promote high-quality reviews, the 2026 DIS Papers track will introduce an Assisted Desk Reject (ADR) step, building on CHI 2026’s implementation. The ADR process will be collaboratively conducted by the Subcommittee Chairs (SCs) and Associate Chairs (ACs), with guidance from Paper Chairs when appropriate. Following ACM’s guidelines for the Evaluation of Submissions, ADR applies when a paper is out of scope or clearly below the threshold for external review.

Assisted Desk Reject is NOT easily determined by a quick read, nor by a single person. ADR decisions are reached collaboratively by SCs and ACs to ensure fairness, consistency, and expert assessment while maintaining a manageable review load. While ADR introduces a new set of criteria distinct from the existing desk reject (DR) criteria, SCs and ACs will be encouraged to consider both holistically.

The Assisted Desk Reject criteria are as follows:

  • Scope: Grossly insufficient literature review to contextualize the proposed novelty/contribution to design research or interactive systems. This is not to say that all papers must cite other DIS papers, but papers should be sufficiently grounded in literature, practices, and relevant works that relate to design in some way. By the same token, a paper making a disproportionately small contribution may be desk rejected, as the size of the contribution should be commensurate with the paper length.
  • Methodology: Grossly insufficient details provided to demonstrate research and methodological transparency and clarity, including insufficient conceptual or argumentative clarity and/or insufficient recounting of methodology.
  • Data: Grossly insufficient data to validate the analysis to support the claim.

All ADR decisions involve SCs and two ACs, with authors receiving a constructive meta-review explaining the decision.

Assisted Desk Rejection Process

  1. SCs check papers and flag papers that are ADR candidates.
  2. 1AC checks their assigned papers for ADR candidates flagged by SCs. 1AC can propose to ADR or decide to keep the flagged paper in the review pool. In this step, 1AC can also identify additional ADR candidates that were missed by SCs.
  3. 1AC then brings their ADR candidates to 2AC. If the two agree in proposing an ADR, the paper is then discussed with the corresponding SCs.
  4. If there is no objection, SCs will notify ADR decisions to the Papers Chairs.
  5. 1AC will write a sufficient and constructive meta review detailing why this paper is assisted desk rejected.

ACM Publication

Important update on ACMs new open access publishing model for 2026 ACM Conferences! Starting January 1, 2026, ACM will fully transition to Open Access: ACMs New Open Access Publishing Model.

ACM Publications Policies

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.

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. 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.

Paper Chairs

  • Clement Zheng, National University of Singapore
  • Daisy Yoo, Technical University of Eindhoven
  • Tony Tang, Singapore Management University

tpc@dis2026.acm.org

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