Kim Snooks shares her reflections on the Designing Interactive Systems conference. Published 26 August 2025.
Last month, I had the opportunity to attend the Designing Interactive Systems conference (DIS) to present our paper ‘Metaphors for ‘Good’ Digital Identities’ on behalf of my co-authors Dan Richards & Ros Williams. DIS is a top human-computer interaction conference with a focus on design based research which took place this year in Madeira, Portugal. I had such a great time and learnt so much about different ways to use speculation & futuring techniques as well as creative approaches to topics such as ethics and large language models.
On the first day, I attended the all day workshop “Six Degrees of Speculation: Towards a Taxonomy of Temporality”, exploring how time is used in speculative work and how that impacts research undertaken. To take part each participant submitted a short paper or pictorial, a paper that prioritises visuals. Our pictorial outlined the online exhibition we made as part of our ‘good’ digital identities project (which you can read more about here). It looked at how temporality was used to explore identity technologies across a person’s own timeline, as well as showcasing a way people can come back to continue to reflect and engage with speculations. In the workshop we read through each of these papers, exploring different approaches to both speculation and time and used this to fuel further conversations in groups in the afternoon session. I really valued a chance to be with other researchers, designers and practitioners working in this space. It helped me think about the different ways futuring approaches can be used to engage people in debate and is something I’ll be able to apply in my own research.
Across the conference there was lots of fascinating work that would be relevant to the digital good network, for example ways to engage communities in value exchange Chopra et al’s work explored. Equally, there were a couple of papers that overlapped with research interests we explored in our own project such as Blythe et al’s work around the power of using metaphors in speculation and Vasconcelos et al’s work that explored the value of annotations and layering as a design material.
On the last day of the conference, I presented our paper in the ethics and values session. This presentation provided an overview of the paper which explored how our Research-through-Design project led to the creation of 8 alternative metaphors around ‘good’ digital identity futures. This resulted in some interesting discussion such as what ‘bad’ as well as ‘good’ digital identity metaphors might look like. This session had lots of work that resonates well with digital good values, such as Chivukula et al’s work which developed a series of cards, designed to encourage ethical debate. As well as ways design can be used to support people’s access to justice in legal situations as Crivellaro et al’s work discussed.
The island of Madeira is full of natural beauty and it was great to have a bit of time to explore the island such as the nuns valley, a small village in the middle of the mountains.
Overall the conference was a great opportunity as an early career researcher to expand my network with others working in a similar field and I would love to attend the conference again in the future!
About the author
Kim Snooks
Associate Researcher
Kim is a design researcher who uses design futuring methods to explore perceptions of personal data in emerging technologies, with a focus on societal challenges.
Her current role in the Digital Good Network focuses on the development of the Digital Good Index (DGI). She was previously involved in the Digital Good Network through a core team research project around ‘good’ future digital identities. Her PhD was in Design at ImaginationLancaster, Lancaster University using speculative methods to critically examine future health-tracking technologies.
