Overview

Welcome from the conference co-chairs

Welcome to DIS2008, the ACM conference on Designing Interactive Systems.

DIStory

The Designing Interactive Systems series of conferences started in 1995 in Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA, around the time that a very influential book was published. Terry Winograd collected together an excellent set of pioneers in this field in his book Bringing Design to Software. Since then the conference has progressed through DIS97, Amsterdam, The Netherlands; DIS2000, New York City, USA; DIS2002, London, UK; DIS2004, Boston, USA; DIS2006, State College, USA; to arrive at DIS2008, in Cape Town, South Africa.

Each of these conferences has helped to develop and shape the field by bringing together designers, software developers, and many other disciplines. DIS2008 will be the first main SIGCHI conference to be held outside the USA or Europe, and as such aims to challenge participants to reflect on designing interactive systems for users outside these established markets. This is especially relevant as these markets are fast becoming more lucrative and influential.

New users... new technologies

Previous DIS conferences have been concerned with bringing together people from different disciplines: e.g. Computer Science, Design, Human-Computer Engineering, Psychology, Interaction Design etc. At DIS 2008 we want to bring together people from different cultures and understand how designs and techniques employed in affluent high-technology environments can be translated to relatively poor environments to be used by people with relatively low literacy levels. Due to the prevalence of cellular handsets throughout the continent, many Africans are now having their first experience of interactive technology. We believe that DIS 2008 will be an important step in understanding how to design interactive systems for these new users.

Audiences

Traditionally, DIS conferences have been attended by the following groups of people:

user experience designers seeking to go beyond usability;
interaction designers both in the large, involved with community building, and in the small, developing interactive objects and installations;
usability people who want to improve experience for ‘users’;
web designers who want to create better Web sites;
information architects;
user interface designers working across the board, including desktop systems, mobile devices, and interactive products;
cognitive and social scientists;
human factors folks;
games designers involved with characters, narrative and game play;
artist designers challenging concepts and creating new art forms;
product designers, and functional designers concerned with market needs and platform constraints;
visual designers concerned with information design and the aesthetics of their systems;
ethnographers and customer service people;
people creating documentation;
software, technical and physical form engineers;
and last (but not least) academics in HCI, from design schools and art schools, from cultural studies, and from business.

Whilst we hope that these groups of people will be well represented at DIS 2008, it is our hope that designers and researchers working in developing world countries, or working with people of low literacy levels, will prioritise attending this conference.

With thanks

And so – welcome to this experience. It could not have happened without the voluntary help of many people. People who have been involved for nearly two years in the planning, reviewing, publishing, organising and presenting of this wide range of ideas and products of interactive media design. Thanks to all the co-chairs, the reviewers and the other volunteers who will look after the running of the conference. We hope you will join us and DIS2008.

Johann van der Schijff (Michaelis School of Fine Art) & Gary Marsden (Department of Computer Science), University of Cape Town.

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