Preface by the Design Society President

The 2013 International Conference on Engineering Design (ICED) will be the nineteenth held since the conference series was inaugurated in 1981. It will also be the sixth held under the auspices of the Design Society, an international society founded in 2001 to develop an understanding of all aspects of design. The previous five conferences have been in Stockholm, Melbourne, Paris, Stanford (California) and Copenhagen, and by holding the conference in Asia for the first time it is surely established as a truly world-wide event. The 2013 conference continues the tradition of holding the conference in an exciting location with a vibrant design research community and for which design is important to local industry and commerce. Seoul is exceptional in this regard, the dynamic heart of the world’s second largest metropolis whose success is built on great design and engineering.

ICED13 also continues the format, established in 2009 and continued in 2011, of a conference programme made up of plenary sessions, podium presentations, discussion sessions with focused debate and workshops led by the Design Society’s Special Interest Groups. We hope that this varied programme, combined with extensive opportunities for networking, will provide an exciting opportunity for researchers and practitioners to learn about the latest developments in design research and practice.

Organising an international conference takes an enormous amount of work, and I would like to express the thanks of the Society to the great team that has worked over many months to make the Conference a success. Especially I would like to thank Yong Se Kim, Sang Won Lee and colleagues at Sungkyunkwan University for their great work in the Organising Committee, and Udo Lindemann, Srinivasan V and the Programme Committee for bringing together such an excellent programme. Of course, their work would be in vain without the fantastic contributions of the authors, reviewers, theme chairs and session chairs, and the thanks of the Society are due to all of them.