From the DUX2003 programme: “How far can design really go? Recently, many within the field of design have worked hard to reposition the practice from its more traditional concerns with product form and behavior and towards an increasing engagement with designing for meaning, experience, and opportunity. As boundaries blur, new potential is created, but it also becomes difficult to properly locate the appropriate focus of design. Interests in emerging technologies and social responsibility add to the pressures on designers to think big while staying focused on those areas where designers can most distinctly add value. So what should designers concentrate on, and how do they know when they've overstepped their bounds? An invited panel of distinguished speakers from inside and outside the field of design discuss its limits. Moderated by Nico Macdonald.” (Panel initially called ‘The Scope of User Experience’.)

Keith Teare, Chairman, President and CEO, Santa Cruz Networks
Founder of RealNames Corporation, Keith describes himself as a “sociologist by education and a technologist by nature”. He was co-founder of Easynet, a premier UK business ISP, and the Cyberia chain of Internet cafés. He is “devoted to applying the most sophisticated technologies to simplify business processes”.

Peter Morville, President and Founder, Semantic Studios
Semantic Studios is a leading information architecture and user experience consulting firm. Peter is co-author (with Louis Rosenfeld) of the best-selling book, Information Architecture for the World Wide Web. He was Chief Executive Officer of Argus Associates, a respected Ann Arbor, MI-based information architecture firm with many blue chip clients. He is on the board of directors of the Asilomar Institute for Information Architecture.

Danny O’Brien, journalist and editor of Need To Know (NTK) newsletter
NTK has been “the UK’s premier sarcastic high-tech news update since 1997” and has now spun off an annual convention, Extreme Computing. Danny writes a weekly column for the London Sunday Times and the Irish Times.

Quinn Norton, usability consultant
Has worked in education, Web, interface and games design, and as a sysadmin for the last 10 years, giving her a very cross-disciplinary view of the issues around user experience.

Panel information on DUX2003 Web site

The edited text of the discussion is available. Comments from the panelists and speakers from the floor were recorded by the moderator in a shared Hydra document which was displayed on the screen. Attendees were also able to post to the same document. (This was an experiment inspired by the recent O’Reilly Emerging Technologies conference and was a qualified success. Much was learned about collaborative public discussion.)