Material for Design

Pictorials as a Material for Design

Pictorials are a great way to communicate design research. However, it can be difficult to find them in conference proceedings and lists, especially as they are sometimes not part of a separate track. Here is a live list that attempts to compile all the published pictorials we’ve been able to find. If you would like yours to be included or if we have missed one, please get in touch!

Readers may be interest in a paper that analyses pictorials published in the 2024 Creativity and Cognition conference entitled:
A Review of Visual Strategies in Pictorials.

Current Limitations

Currently, pictorials are widely regarded as “full” research papers, submitted to conferences or journals as landscape or portrait papers with a pictorial submission type. Both types need to rely heavily on visuals beyond formats such as graphs and diagrams. Some venues, such as NordiCHI, accept but do not distinguish portrait pictorials, so they are currently not included as they require more analysis as to what constitutes a pictorial in their proceedings. Similarly, ACM extended abstract papers that are landscape but not “full” papers are not being considered. Formats such as “pictorial works” also exist in certain journals, which will need to be considered. The VISAP license needs to be investigated before thumbnails can be included in the gallery.

Gallery Thumbnails

If you are an author of one of the pictorials and would prefer to submit your own thumbnail, please contact m.l.smith[at]lboro.ac.uk with a 500×500 image.

The Interacting with Computers journal has recently (2024) started accepting pictorials as a submission type. We have not found any published yet.

All the RTD conferences are technically in a pictorial format. It is/was a great conference series that will hopefully one day return. Although they are broken down by year, all but the 2013 edition can be found here.

Finding separate papers of the 2013 conference has proven unsuccessful. Separating these is on the agenda, but it is not a high priority.

TEI is actually quite good at giving examples on their sites and still organises the pictorials in tracks, but here is the full list.

Some of the VISAP links are broken and had to be resolved through other links.

The pictorial gallery is being built slowly, it is a very manual process.