LIMITS 2025 11th Workshop on Computing within Limits

About LIMITS 2025

The LIMITS workshop concerns the role of computing in human societies situated in a world of limits, such as limits of extractive logics, limits to a biosphere’s ability to recover, limits to our knowledge, or limits to technological solutions to societal issues. As an interdisciplinary group of researchers, practitioners, and scholars, we seek to reshape the computing research agenda, grounded by an awareness that contemporary computing research is intertwined with ecological limits in general, and climate- and climate justice-related limits in particular. LIMITS 2025 solicits submissions that move us closer towards computing that supports diverse human and non-human lifeforms and thriving biospheres.

LIMITS Hubs

In 2025, LIMITS will be a virtual, distributed workshop. We welcome participants to organize local gatherings or "LIMITS-hubs" that encourage community-building and sharing of infrastructure. Reach out to Jan Tobias Mühlberg (jan.tobias.muehlberg@ulb.be) if interested.

Registration

Registration information will be available closer to the workshop. Attendance is free. Registration is required for all attendees in order for us to plan group activities, to send you the connection link and any schedule updates.

Mailing List

To engage with the LIMITS comunity, please subscribe to our mailing list by sending an email to limits+subscribe@googlegroups.com.

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