DIS 2026 Conference Report

By Bingcan “Gloria” Guo, HCDE master's student

Attending DIS 2026 in Singapore was a wonderful and rewarding experience that sharpened my sense of my own research, which sits within Human-AI interaction and creativity support tools. As an incoming HCI PhD student, engaging at a conference like this gave me both validation and a clearer map of the field's open questions.

The anchor of the trip was our own paper, ReFinE: Streamlining UI Mockup Iteration with Research Findings, presented by our first author and my mentor Donghoon Shin (UW HCDE PhD) on the afternoon of June 15 in the Structured AI Support for Design Work session. In this work, we designed and developed a Figma plugin that finds, translates, and contextualizes scholarly research insights directly in the designer's current Figma prototype workspace. The project was a collaboration with Jaewook Lee (UW CSE PhD), mentored by Professor Lucy Lu Wang (UW iSchool) and Professor Gary Hsieh (UW HCDE).

Our talk was well received and prompted an engaged Q&A that helped surface future directions and follow-up work. Seeing our framing land with a room of researchers working on adjacent problems was affirming, and the hallway conversations afterward were some of the most useful feedback I got all week. In the same session, I was also drawn to IdeaBlocks: Expressing and Reusing Divergent Intents for Graphic Design Exploration using Generative AI, which received an honorable mention. The paper showed how designers can express divergent intents through PDR (property, direction, and range) parametric tuning. It also got me thinking about a timely question: how do we structure and support design exploration when AI tends to jump straight to the converging stages?

On the afternoon of June 16, I attended the AI Support for Reflection and Writing session, chaired by Donghoon. It covered an interesting set of papers on designing tools for AI-infused writing. I was especially interested in Metaphors for Memory: Charting a Design Space of AI Memory Tools and Interfaces, presented by Munyeong Kim from UMontreal. The paper charts a design space for AI memory interfaces by surveying existing tools, then uses generative metaphorical design to surface new design opportunities.
Beyond the talks, I got to visit the NUS HCI lab and see the impressive 3D printing work the researchers are working on. I also explored Singapore's downtown districts and shared some great meals with fellow student researchers — the kind of informal time that made the trip just as memorable as the sessions themselves.

Huge thanks to UW HCDE for supporting this opportunity!! I'm very grateful for the funding that covered registration, travel, and accommodation and made this experience possible.