DIS

Welcome to the historic, vibrant and beautiful city of Edinburgh. Scotland's capital is imbued with a rich tradition of creativity, design, innovation and research, making it a most fitting home for the 12th ACM SIGCHI Designing Interactive Systems (DIS'17) conference.

Running biennially since 1995, the Designing Interactive Systems (DIS) Conference is the premier, international arena where designers, artists, psychologists, user experience researchers, systems engineers, and many more, come together to debate and shape the future of interactive systems design and practice. DIS is owned by the ACM Special Interest Group on Computer- Human Interaction (SIGCHI). In the past, DIS has been held in Ann Arbor (1995), Amsterdam (1997), New York (2000), London (2002), Boston (2004), State College (2006), Cape Town (2008), Aarhus (2010), Newcastle (2012), Vancouver (2014), Brisbane (2016) and now, in 2017, moves to a new era of annual conferences.

The DIS'17 conference schedule starts with two days of pre-conference workshops and a doctoral consortium and continues with three main conference days into which we have packed 130 peer reviewed paper and pictorial presentations into 30 sessions across three parallel tracks, alongside which we have demos, provocations and works in progress, a lunchtime symposium held by Facebook and two invited keynote speakers. The social program includes a welcome reception on Sunday evening, a Demos & Posters Industry Reception on Monday night, the DIS conference dinner on Tuesday night, and a post-conference closing drinks party on Wednesday night.

The theme of DIS 2017 is bridging and connecting -- across disciplines, practices, places and understandings. The most interesting things happen at edges and boundaries, and so the aim of the 2017 conference is to examine different approaches to framing knowledge about the design of interactive systems. As advancements in interactive technology continue to blur the demarcations between people and data, and between things and software, interaction designers and researchers are finding new ways to explore this evolving, interdisciplinary landscape. At DIS 2017 we shall consider the contrasts and commonalities that are central in shaping the landscape of emerging interaction paradigms.

I am very proud that we have been able to curate and assemble a stellar program, including two invited keynote presentations by Salvatore Iaconesi (ISIA Design Florence) and Di Mainstone (QMU), I am sure they and the program will encourage much thought, discussion and future endeavours.