By Pitch Sinlapanuntakul, HCDE PhD Candidate
DIS 2026, Singapore
June 13–17, 2026
In June 2026, I attended ACM DIS 2026 in Singapore, where I presented 2 papers from my doctoral dissertation work. Both were part of the same session, Designing AI Concepts and Values. The first introduced the AI Concept Envisioning Toolkit, a structured approach to supporting designers in anticipating and mitigating harm during early-stage AI concept development. The second reported empirical findings on how designers envision value-oriented AI concepts when working with generative AI. Having both papers in the same session felt significant. It made me feel that my work is coherent and that it belongs in a particular conversation. The session was well attended, and the audience asked about the thinking behind the work, how I came to frame the problem the way I did, and even what informed the process of building the toolkit and designing the study.
Attending the rest of the conference deepened something I had not fully anticipated. While sitting through sessions like Situated Design: Rural, Domestic, Placed and Community, Justice, and Design, I kept noticing the various ways rigor can exist without relying on numbers in study design. DIS made that feel obvious rather than something I needed to defend. The Speculative Futures and Temporal Reflection session resonated closely with how I now think about anticipatory and harm-aware design. Craft, Fabrication, and Materials was simply exciting to attend, a reminder of how wide and alive the field of design, and design research more broadly, really is.
What shifted most for me, though, was harder to pin to any single session. It was cumulative. Hearing how other researchers talk about design not just as a practice, but as a way of thinking and framing problems, a way of caring about the world and the people in it, made me want to claim that orientation more fully in my own work. There is a kind of intellectual seriousness in design research that I think I did not realize I had underestimated, and DIS helped me recognize it more clearly.
Singapore itself was just amazing. The city, the hotel, the spaces the conference moved through, all of it made me notice how design can work seamlessly in service of sustainability and the natural environment. It was easy to get around, the food was extraordinary, and the whole place had an energy that made showing up each day feel like something to look forward to.
I am deeply grateful for the opportunity to travel, present, and be present in person with the DIS community. To have two dissertation papers on the same stage, to have people engage with the thinking behind them, and to leave with new intellectual threads, I am even more excited about who I am becoming as a researcher.