Nathalie Bonnardel, Tamara Sumner, Supporting Evaluation in Design, Acta Psychologica, 91, 1996, pp 221-244
Abstract
Design problem-solving requires designers to be creative and to express evaluative judgments. Designers propose successive partial solutions and evaluate these solutions with respect to various criteria and constraints. Evaluation plays a major role in design because each successive evaluation step guides the course of design activity. However, evaluation of design solutions is difficult for both experienced and inexperienced designers because: (1) in complex domains, no single person can know all the relevant criteria and constraints, and (2) design solutions must be evaluated from multiple, and sometimes conflicting, perspectives. Domain-oriented design environments have been proposed as computational tools supporting designers to construct and evaluate design solutions. Critiquing systems embedded in these environments support evaluation activities by analysing design solutions for compliance with criteria and constraints encoded in the system’s knowledge-base. To investigate the impact of such systems, we have designed, built, and evaluated a domain-oriented design environment for a specific area: phone-based interface design. Professional designers were observed using the design environment to solve a complex design task. Analyses of these design sessions enabled us to identify reactions common to all designers, as well as reactions depending on the designers’ level of domain experience.
Kent McPhee, Design Theory and Software Design, Technical Report TR 96-26, October 1996, Department of Computing Science, University of Alberta
Abstract
Software design methods share many characteristics with design methods in other fields. All these methods are the progeny of philosophies of design that are in turn influenced by more general philosophic movements. This essay begins with the influence of philosophies of science on the study of design, highlighting the effects on design discourse of Cartesian rationality, the hypothetico-deductive account of scientific progress, and Kuhnian paradigms. Next, the influence of the constructivist and humanist movements on design thinking are considered, culminating in the introduction of a philosophy of design based on hermeneutics, or interpretation. The influence of design philosophy on software design methods begins a categorization of several software design methods according to the design theory framework, with some emphasis on design methods that support a hermeneutical style of design. Some justification for a pluralistic approach to software design methodology rounds out the essay.
Sakol Teeravarunyou, Carlos Teixeira, Perspectives on Building a Philosophy of Design, Visible Language,
Abstract
In recent years, design schools in different countries have started PhD programs in industrial design. These programs have been established due to different reasons and under completely different circumstances. Among those institutions there are also design schools from peripheral countries. Given the short history of industrial design in those countries, a rapid development of postgraduate design education to include PhD in industrial design raises questions about the characteristics of those programs and factors that led to their emergence in a peripheral context. This paper discusses the development characteristics of the PhD education in industrial design in Turkey as a case with references to both, the universal standards of PhD programs and local dynamics that led to the emergence of those programs. It is argued that despite an early beginning in Turkey, there is a need for the redefinition of the PhD education in industrial design.
A Field for Growing Doctorates in Design? Klaus Krippendorff
Victor Margolin, History, theory and criticism in Doctoral design education
A summary is available
Jay Melican, Izabel Barros, Roberto Holguin, Jooyun Joh, So, You're going to be .... a Doctor of Design?
Abstract
This paper was prepared for the conference on Doctoral Education in Design held in October, 1998 at the Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio (U.S.A.). Responding to the issues proposed by conference organizers, this paper addresses the questions: What are the job prospects for a Ph.D. in design? and What motivates interest (on a personal level) in doctoral education in design today? Data reported in this paper were gathered through an international survey of design researchers seeking doctoral degrees in their field. This study of doctoral researchers in design touches on issues of their motivations for pursuing the Ph.D., their research interests, and the financial resources available to them in funding their postgraduate studies. The results of the survey are summarized, and analyses and interpretations of results are offered. Additional demographic information on doctoral researchers was gathered through the survey and is reported in this paper as well.
In the summary that follows, the most salient cross cultural similarities and differences in responses are highlighted. Anecdotal outtakes as well as tabular and graphical descriptions are included as appropriate to the qualitative data. The intent of this study is to examine and to begin to express the factors currently motivating doctoral students in their studies and to provide a basis for continued discussion on what might be done in the near future to encourage researchers of all nationalities to pursue postgraduate degrees in design.
Yoram Reich, The study of design research methodology, Transaction of the ASME Journal of Mechanical Design
Abstract
Studies on design research methodology are infrequent, although there is a consensus that more effort is needed for improving design research quality. Previous calls for exercising better research methodology have been unsuccessful. As numerous studies reveal, there is no single scientific methodology that is exercised in science or in any other research practice. Rather, research methodologies are socially constructed. Since some constructions are better than others for different purposes, it become valuable to study different methodologies and their influence on research practice and results. Proposals for such studies are offered.
A summary is available.
Dionysios Synodinos, Paris Avgeriou, WOnDA: an extensible multi-platform hypermedia system , Workshop on Efficient Web-based Information Systems, September 2nd 2002, Montpellier France, published in the Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Volume 2426, Advances in Object-Oriented Information Systems", Springer-Verlag Heidelberg, 2002.
Abstract
The design and development of hypermedia applications that are deployed on the Web and other delivery platforms is largely conducted on an intuitive, ad hoc basis, thus resulting in inefficient systems that are hard to modify, maintain and port to alternative platforms. There are now justifiable research and development efforts that attempt to formalize the engineering process of such systems in order to achieve certain quality attributes like modifiability, maintainability and portability. This paper presents such an attempt for designing a conceptual model of a hypermedia application that allows for easy update and alteration of its content as well as its presentation and also allows for deployment in various platforms. In specific this model explicitly separates the hypermedia content from its presentation to the user, by employing XML content storage and XSL transformations. Our work is based upon the empirical results of designing, developing and deploying hypermedia applications in various platforms, and on the practices of well-established hypermedia engineering techniques.
D. Synodinos, P. Avgeriou, “The Art of Multi-channel Hypermedia Application Development”, proceedings of the Workshop on Emerging Applications for Wireless and Mobile Access, at the Twelfth International World Wide Web Conference, Budapest, Hungary, May 20, 2003.
Yoram Reich, Transcending the Theory-Practice Problem
Andrew Vellino, What is System Design?
Simon Buskingham Shum, Design Argumentation as Design Rationale, The Encyclopedia of Computer Science and Technology, A. Kent and J. G. Williams (eds). New York: Marcel Dekker, Inc (1996)
Gotz Bock, What is Design Rationale, Powerpoint presentation about Design Rationale
As presented here Design Rationale is a process, diagramming and concepts used to represent a design including issues, tradeoffs, criteria, evaluations, alternatives etc.
Is related to at least 3 other related processes
- IBIS (Issue-based information systems)
3 nodes, 9 relations, objects - PHI (Procedural Hierarchy of Issues - extends IBIS
- QOC (Questions, Opinions, Criteria)
Conclusions: powerful but complicated, other solutions not expressive enough, hard to use in "conventional" design process
James Herbsled, Eiji Kuwana, Preserving Knowledge in Design Projects: What Designers Need to Know, InterCHI'93, 24-29 April 1993
Abstract
In order to inform the design of technology support and new procedural methods for software design, we analyzed the content of real design meetings in tlmx organizations, focusing in particular on the questions the designers ask of each other. We found that most questions concerned the project requirements, particularly what the software was supposed to do and, somewhat less frequently, scenarios of use. Questions about functions to be performed by software components and how these functions were to be realized were also fairly frequent. Rationales for design decisions were seldom asked about. The implications of this research for design tools and methods are discussed.
Simon Buckingham Shum, Design Argumentation as Design Rationale
Abstract
A design rationale (DR) is a representation of the reasoning behind the design of an artifact. In recent years, the use of semiformal notations for organising arguments about design decisions has attracted much interest within the software engineering and human-computer interaction communities, leading to the development of a number of DR notations and tool environments. This article begins by reviewing the motivation for expressing DR as design argumentation, and then surveys evidence from design studies to show when and how it can be productive to construct explicit design argumentation during design. The article then discusses practical cognitive, organizational and technological factors which could facilitate the uptake of design rationale systems.
Phil Agre, Hierarchy and History in Simon's "Architecture of Complexity", Journal of the Learning Sciences 12(3), 2003.
Kalle Lyytinen, Designing of what? - On the ontologies of information systems design
Tim Marshall, Sid Newton, Scholarly design as a paradigm for practice-based research, Working paper in Art & Design -- some journal
Looks at what happens when traditional academe instigates practice based research
Joseph Paradiso, From Trash Heaps to Toolkits and Chaos to Convection – Management and Innovation at Leading-Edge Design Organizations and Idea Labs, position paper, Managaing as designing Workshop, Weatherhead School of Management, Case Western University, June 14-15, 2002
Wanda Orlikowski, Managing and Designing: Learning about Enactment, position paper, Managaing as designing Workshop, Weatherhead School of Management, Case Western University, June 14-15, 2002
Lucy Suchman, Managing and designing as everyday practices of ordering, Weatherhead workshop
Philip Agre, Designing a wired life, Proceedings of WebNet'2000
Once upon a time, Western culture associated information technology with an old and powerful story about the future. The future, according to this story, lies in rationality, and the task of the engineer is to discover optimally rational social arrangements in a scientific manner and then impose these arrangements upon the world. This picture was already fashionable in the early 19th century through the works of Henri de Saint-Simon (Hayek 1952), and it remained vigorous until the end of the Cold War (Lilienfeld 1978). Information technology grew up in the midst of this project of social rationalization, and the main tradition of computer system design is still organized around a cycle with three phases: studying existing work practices, rationalizing them, and either automating them altogether or using technology to impose a rational order on them.