Travel: NSF Student Travel Grant for 2025 ACM Conference on Tangible, Embedded and Embodied Interaction (TEI)

This award will support about six (6) student attendees for the 2025 Association for Computing Machinery Conference on Tangible, Embedded and Embodied Interaction (TEI). TEI is a leading conference at the intersection of physical and digital interaction design that brings together researchers, practitioners, businesses, artists, designers, and students from various disciplines, including engineering, interaction design, computer science, product design, media studies, and the arts. Selected students will participate in either the Graduate Student Consortium (GSC) or the Student Design Competition (SDC) parts of the conference. The GSC is a one-day event held before the main conference where promising scholars are selected to participate in a day-long critical discussion and review of their work with senior mentors. The SDC issues a design challenge, solicits a demonstration video and a document with rationale/motivation for their design visions from student teams, and selects a small number of teams to present at the conference. Participating in the GSC or SDC helps students gain experience communicating their work and critiquing the work of peers. Through this, along with the feedback provided by senior mentors, graduate students will develop new research insights and directions, a greater awareness of the field, and a stronger knowledge of related disciplines to inform their work. Beyond the student consortium and design competition themselves, students will also be invited to present their work at the main conference, giving their work wider visibility in the community. This will allow students to build professional and social connections that transcend the conference event and gain awareness of potential career paths in both academia and industry. Thus, the travel grant will contribute to the professional development of a more knowledgeable, capable, and productive workforce in the U.S., helping graduate students from a wide range of disciplinary, institutional, topical, and personal backgrounds succeed in TEI-related research areas. Students will be selected based on the quality of their submissions and the likelihood that their work indicates a sustained interest and future effort in the field. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.