LIMITS 2025

Call For Papers

We welcome scholarship by researchers, engineers, designers, and artists who are investigating and/or (re)designing computing systems in ways that engage with pressing ecological and social issues and crises.

LIMITS is a place for a wide range of perspectives and approaches.

We invite works that build on previous LIMITS work, such as provocations from earlier LIMITS gatherings (e.g., Unplanned Obsolescence, LIMITS 2017 or Computing as Ecocide, LIMITS 2023), that broadens the understanding of LIMITS (e.g., Age of Consequences, LIMITS 2015), that explores our own limits (e.g., Computing within Psychological Limits, LIMITS 2015), that explores strategies for working in a LIMITed world (e.g., Limits-aware computing, LIMITS 2015), or that design and/or build transitional systems (e.g., Solar-powered website, LIMITS 2021). Transitional Systems attempt to (re) design, implement, and/or evaluate a real-world or hypothetical socio-technical computing system in response to “implications for design” raised by earlier LIMITS papers or LIMITS-related scholarship in the areas of computing and sustainability, computing and climate-justice.

LIMITS also strives to be a place for envisioning technologies otherwise: a place for pluriversal design, for work that considers how visions and frameworks of degrowth and post-growth affect computing, or how computing can grapple with colonialism.

We also encourage authors to envision and submit research on Hypothetical Systems, i.e., speculative design work or proposals for hypothetical computing systems or artifacts (either software, hardware, or some combination) that embody LIMITS thinking. Who would use this system? Who might benefit from engaging with the system? Who might be harmed? How are the premises (conceptual or concrete) upon which the system is built different from our current computing systems? How does LIMITS-informed system design enact different worlds or ways of being in these worlds?

We encourage authors to consider the stories they tell and reify through their work. As Costanza-Chock reminds us, “Stories have power”. They ask us to consider, “(…) what stories are told about design problems, solutions, contexts, and outcomes? Who gets to tell these stories? Who participates, who benefits, and who is harmed?” (Costanza-Chock 2020 p. 134).

Key Dates

Paper submission deadline: April 25th, 2025, 11:59pm AoE
Paper reviews available: June 3rd, 2025
Camera ready deadline: June 20th, 2025
LIMITS Workshop: June 26th-27th, 2025

Submissions

Register and submit papers at this site. (If you have any issues with the submission site, please email Christoph Becker.)

Papers should adhere to the following guidelines:

• Papers should be in ACM double-column format, using the most recent template, but without ACM copyright information.
• You achieve this by using

  samples/sample-sigconf.tex

  from the downloaded archive as a base for your paper, and modify the header as follows:

  %% Rights management information.  This information is sent to you
  %% when you complete the rights form.  These commands have SAMPLE
  %% values in them; it is your responsibility as an author to replace
  %% the commands and values with those provided to you when you
  %% complete the rights form.
  \setcopyright{none}
  \settopmatter{printacmref=false}
  \acmDOI{}
  \acmISBN{}
  
  %% These commands are for a PROCEEDINGS abstract or paper.
  \acmConference[LIMITS '25]{11th Workshop on Computing within Limits}{June 26--27, 2025}{Online}
                    

  You can further remove the CCS concepts from your submission by commenting out the CCSXML and \ccsdesc lines.
• The body of the paper should be a minimum of 5 pages and a maximum of 10 pages, with an unlimited number of pages allowed for references.

Reviewing will be non-blind; authors should include their names and contact information and reviews will include reviewer names.

All papers will be made freely available on the workshop website. Copyright will remain with the authors.