Alistair Sutcliff DIS was the first in what is hoped to be series of conferences focusing on the design process of interactive systems. Attendance was approximately 125 from USA, Europe and Japan.
Many new conferences go through an identity crisis and DIS is no exception.
The main objective was to shape the vision of what design is and how it can be improved. Anyway, there is my personal reflection on some of the papers and sessions. The opening plenary presentation by Henry Petroski set out an interesting perspective of engineering design. Taking the humble paper clip and pencil, Petroski showed how design is often sub-optimal, a response to constraints and economics of the real world and evolves over time. How the design compromises and variations for something as apparently simple as a paper clip, scale up to complex software systems is a key issue, however, Petroski's presentation stopped short of covering complex artifacts.