It was a great pleasure to host the 2017 IEEE 21st International Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work in Design (CSCWD 2017), which took place at the Victoria Business School, Victoria University of Wellington, Wellington, New Zealand, from April 26 to 28, 2017.

The CSCWD community promotes a multiplicity of views of the "design" phenomenon, with some emphasis on the engineering domain but also establishing rich links with other domains such as computer science, human-computer interaction, information systems, emergency management, social sciences, etc. The fact that CSCWD 2017 is organised by a business school highlights the degree of inclusiveness fostered by this series of conferences.

Even though the conference this year was hosted very far away from the busiest travel hubs, we nevertheless received 120 submissions. After a rigorous process of evaluation, 94 papers were selected for publication in the proceedings and oral presentation at the conference. The accepted papers were organised in 18 specialised tracks. Besides having well-established tracks addressing collaboration mechanisms, engineering design, engineering systems, and manufacturing, we were pleased to notice emerging tracks such as crowdsourcing, healthcare, risk and emergency, and cloud and mobility. These topics suggest that CSCWD addresses a dynamic research community. It is also very pleasing to recognise that the conference was a privileged forum for PhD students to present their research. We received 39 student registrations at CSCWD 2017, most probably presented their research to an international community for the first time.

The conference technical program also included three outstanding keynote speeches: "The Complexities of Sustainability and Design: How sustainable are our systems designs? Can we design systems for sustainability?", given by Prof. Jan Recker, from Queensland University of Technology, Australia; "Crime Prediction using Patterns and Context", given by Prof. José A. Pino, from University of Chile, Chile; and "Collaborative Editing Research: from Academic Curiosity to Real-World Application", given by Prof. Chengzheng Sun, from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.

We wish to express our appreciation and thanks to Victoria Business School for supporting the conference. We would also like to recognise the active support of colleagues and PhD students organizing the conference (in alphabetical order): Andreas Drechsler, Ijeoma Enwereuzo, Julia Dakova, Markus Lukzak-Roesch, and Tenanoia Simona. Special thanks also go to Vanessa Venter and Jill Purvis for invaluable administrative support.

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