TEI

The curves crossed several years ago: the number of CPUs embedded in things outpaced CPUs in "computers". Quickly we're growing accustomed to cities, rooms, furniture, clothing, appliances, and all manner of ordinary places and objects "enhanced" with computational behavior. Weiser's Computer for the 21st Century anticipated this trend, now variously called pervasive, ambient, invisible, and ubiquitous computing. As computation seeps seamlessly into everyday things, interaction moves on from point-and-click and entangles our bodies as well as our minds. The TEI community investigates interaction where physical and computational things can no longer be simply separated.

The 2011 ACM SIGCHI conference on Tangible, Embedded and Embodied Interaction marks five years of sharing interdisciplinary work on embedding computing technologies in physical objects and places. The first TEI conference was hosted by Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge (2007); subsequent annual TEI conferences were at the B-IT Center in Bonn (2008), Microsoft Research, Cambridge, UK (2009), and the MIT Media Lab (Cambridge, MA, 2010). The conference is young but no longer in its infancy. It's now concerned not only with "things that think" (to borrow a phrase from MIT) but with the thoughtful design of thinking things.

The diverse TEI community includes systems researchers, HCI researchers, interaction and industrial designers, and artists. Each constituency brings key knowledge, skills, and core values. Systems researchers build innovative hardware and software that explores, investigates, or demonstrates new ways of interacting with things. HCI researchers study interactions people have with these systems, bringing expertise in behavioral sciences and empirical study. Designers shape the interaction itself. And artists, free from pragmatic constraints of purpose, investigate the boundaries of the possible.

The TEI 2011 tracks include Papers--a blind reviewed track with 2, 4, and 8 page papers; Art Explorations--a juried track of innovative tangible interactive art and performance pieces; Workshops--mini-symposia on a theme or topic; Studios--hands-on explorations of a technology or technique. The Graduate Student Consortium invites emerging researchers, designers, and artists to exchange ideas with one another and with more seasoned members of the TEI community. Finally, new this year, the Design Challenge invites a student competition of designs demonstrated at the conference.

Three program chairs worked with six associate program chairs to shepherd reviews. Each paper received at least three reviews, one of which--usually a meta-review--was prepared by a member of the program committee. Based on these, program chairs selected papers for presentation at the conference. TEI's review process differs slightly from other ACM SIGCHI conferences: In addition to selecting which papers will be presented at the conference (and included in the Proceedings), the program chairs determine the presentation format. Some work is presented as a short or long talk; other work as an interactive demonstration or poster. All papers receive the same review process according to the same criteria, independent of eventual presentation format.

We received 203 paper submissions and accepted fewer than 32%. In detail: We accepted 11 papers for fifteen-minute talk + demo presentations, 7 for fifteen-minute talk presentations, 8 for five-minute talk + demo presentations, 12 for five-minute talk presentations, 19 for demo presentations, and 8 papers for poster presentations. In total we accepted 65 papers: 23 eight-page papers, 34 four-page papers, and 8 two-page papers.

You can see even from the titles of the papers, art pieces, studios, and workshops the diversity of interests that engage the TEI community. They range from toolkits to tabletops, from music to making, from programming to pillows. What brings it all together is a commitment to the synthesis of technology, physicality, design, and people.