Design Computing and Cognition ’04 III for a while now soft 70174 Stuttgart for a while now soft computing has been applied successfully in areas like pattern recognition Finding a balance between these two extremes will lead to an overall behavior of the individual agents and of the multi agent system that meets the demands of the environment but also the demand for high quality problem solving results The papers in this volume are from the "First International Conference on Design Computing and Cognition" (DCC'04) held at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology there has been a growing interest in what designers do when they design and how they use computational tools