April 15, 2025: the call is advertised
May 15, 2025: authors’ submissions are due Extended submission deadline: June 9, 2025
May 30, 2025: notifications of acceptance are communicated
August 2025: workshop at the decennial Aarhus conference, in Aarhus, Denmark
Authors are invited to submit a 2-4 page position paper following the ACM single-column format – either by using the Word or LaTeX template. To promote relevant contributions from both researchers and practitioners (e.g., activists, representatives of the public sector, designers, industry practitioners), we encourage alternative submissions, such as, design portfolios, short manifestos, pictorials, speculative designs, or design fictions. We welcome empirical cases, theoretical pieces, or short proposals for future research. Submissions will be assessed by the workshop organisers based on their quality, novelty, and relevance to the workshop’s topics. We will aim for a good balance of perspectives and cases. We will do our best to accommodate specific accessibility needs. Authors can specify any particular requirement in their position papers, or by directly contacting the organisers.
Position papers to be sent to: impactworkshop@dsv.su.se
We invite authors to frame – but not limit – their contributions through the following questions.
What/Whom to think with? Diverse theories, concepts, and frameworks can be useful to (re)orient conversations about impact in academic research. While metaphors of proliferation [11], scaling out rather than up [12, 16], and ecologies of participation [20] provide alternatives to the big numbers of global platforms, other lenses can help understand impacts amid organisational realities and constraints [15]. For example, change management frameworks [9], with their managerial perspective on how to guide organizations through change, can provide support to translate research findings into actionable steps. Motivational theories can help [23] outline relations between organisational impact and individuals’ values and interests. Systems thinking [18] can bring to the fore the ripple effects that impacting part of a system can have on its many components. While implementation science can help make sense of how and why implementation of research results in practice can succeed or fail [19, 26].
What and how to do it? Participatory Design, Action Research, and Ethnography are well-established strategies that can help balancing tensions between academic extractivism [10] and efforts to make sites for social change visible [25]. While they encompass a range of methodologies that have been relevant to impactful computing research, their use is not always straightforward. Aligning research interests and views of relevant outcomes entails balancing different interests, maintaining good relations with both team members and other project participants, or deciding how to report stories of failure. All these aspects require negotiations and emotional work that are often invisible in accounts of impact. Furthermore, against the current backdrop of technological development, mostly driven by a few actors and large revenues, we ask where academic research stands, and what it currently means to “ask better questions” [6].
At what level? Impact can be achieved at different scales – e.g., individual actions and collective initiatives, organisations, governance, policy-making – through bottom-up, top-down, and mid-stream approaches [2, 8]. The level at which impact is targeted has implications on who is invited to participate [17] in projects, as well as on dissemination and implementation efforts. Under this theme, we invite participants to consider how different levels of scale, from local practices to broader systemic change, can shape how impact is framed, and the work and partnerships needed to proliferate impacts across these levels (e.g., to move from the collection of environmental data to policy-making).