Sketch & The Lizard King: Supporting Image Inclusion in HCI Publishing.

Almost all research output includes tables, diagrams, photographs and even sketches, and papers within HCI typically take advantage of including these figures in their files. However the space given to non diagrammatical or tabular figures is often small, even in papers that primarily concern themselves with visual output. The reason for this might be the publishing models employed in most proceedings and journals: Despite moving to a digital format which is unhindered by page count or physical cost, there remains a somewhat arbitrary limitation on page count. Recent moves by ACM SIGCHI and others to remove references from the maximum page count suggest that there is movement on this, however images remain firmly within the limits of the text. We propose that images should be celebrated - not penalised - and call for not only the adoption of the Pictorials format in CHI, but for images to be removed from page counts in order to encourage greater transparency of process in HCI research.