Student Design Challenge

The OzCHI Student Design Challenge is an annual international student design competition run as part of the OzCHI conference. The challenge is open to student teams from around the world. It’s a great opportunity to test and improve your design skills and get your work exposed to the wider HCI community.  This competition is suited to students from diverse fields, including human-computer interaction, interaction design, computer science, architecture, and humanities.

Based on the Design Brief, teams work to research, brainstorm, sketch, prototype, and role play to design a solution responding to the brief. At the end of the challenge period, teams submit a video showcasing their design, and a poster. Experienced HCI scholars and designers peer review the submissions to select finalist teams. Finalists will present their design at OzCHI (Sydney, Australia in Dec 2025), and a panel of judges, including industry representatives, selects the winning team.

The challenge brief will relate to this year’s conference theme of Generative Intelligences, Planetary Futures.

Prize

Two registrations per team of the top three finalists. The top three teams will be awarded and receive a certificate of recognition.

How It Works

This year, taking inspiration from the CHI Conference's Student Design Competition, where participants have an extended period to work on their projects, with the brief released well in advance, giving participants ample time to develop their ideas.

At the start of the two-week challenge period, student teams will receive a brief containing a real-world HCI research problem.

Submission Format:

• A 5-minute video clip (check technical requirements for video content at CHI)
• A poster
• Proof of all team members’ student status
• Submissions are not anonymous and should include all author names, affiliations, and contact information.

This will describe an issue or topic that is relatively broad and open-ended, so teams will need to use their initiative to identify a specific aspect of the problem that they can respond to through their design. To help with this, the brief also includes:

• Contextual information about the problem
• Links to background reading: relevant scholarly literature relevant to the topic
• Instructions for the final submission.

The suggested steps for completing the challenge include a literature review, brainstorming, designing ‘magic machines’, storyboarding, prototyping and reflection. These steps should enable teams to identify a specific design issue related to the topic, and design a solution to address it.  They are not compulsory steps, rather just suggestions. The design of your process is completely up to your team and is part of the challenge!

We ask teams to NOT gather primary data (e.g. interviews, surveys) from external participants. Data about the problem situation can be gathered through e.g. team brainstorming, reports, news articles, scholarly literature and other sources. Evaluation can take the form of reflection, discussion and internal review.

Team Eligibility

• Teams must have from 2 to 3 members
• At the time of the SDC all members must be students at any stage of their university career, from undergraduate to postgraduate studies. Team members can be from multiple disciplines, institutions, or even multiple countries or continents.
• A participant may not be a member of more than one team.
• Each team is required to provide the contact details of a Team Representative (who will be our contact during the challenge).

What to Expect: The Challenge Brief

The brief describes an issue or topic that is relatively broad and open-ended, so teams will need to use their initiative to identify a specific aspect of the problem that they can respond to through their design. To help with this, the brief also includes:

• Contextual information about the problem
• Links to background reading: relevant scholarly literature relevant to the topic
• Instructions for the final submission.

The Challenge Brief

To be released on 15 September 2025.

Submission Instructions

Well done! Your team is now ready to upload your SDC entry. Please ensure that your submission includes all required documents in:

• One folder: Name the folder using the alphabetical order of family names of team members (e.g., "Anderson_Jones_Taylor.zip").
• Ensure that all files (video, poster) are named identically to the .zip file (e.g., "Anderson_Jones_Taylor.mp4").

Double check that the following files are included:

• 5-Minute Video Clip 
• Please refer to the brief for the content of your video. 
• Poster (PDF) 
• Please refer to the brief for the content of your poster. 
• Poster size: 1080 x 1920 px (posters will be displayed on digital screens)
• Proof of Student Status 
• Submit valid proof for each team member (e.g., student ID).
• Upload your .zip file here: Link to be available on 22 September 2025.

Important Dates

• 15 September 2025: Challenge Open / Challenge Brief Release
• 22 September 2025: Submission Link Available
• 29 September 2025: Challenge Closes
• 10 October 2025: Notification

Dates are given in Anywhere on Earth (AoE) time zone. The deadline for submission is 11:59 PM AoE on the specified date. You can check the current AoE time here.

Contact

Student Design Challenge Chairs
Moe Qashlan (The University of Sydney)
Yiyuan Wang (University of Technology Sydney)
Pete Worthy (The University of Queensland)
sdc.chair@ozchi.org