Table Of ContentDesign Rationale
Concepts, Techniques, and Use
COMPUTERS, COGNITION, AND WORK
A series edited by:
Gary M. Olson, Judith S. Olson, and Bill Curtis
Fox • The Human Tutorial Dialogue Project: Issues in the Design
of Instructional Systems
Moran/Carroll (Eds.) • Design Rationale: Concepts, Techniques, and Use
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Smith • Collective Intelligence in Computer-Based Collaboration
Design Rationale
Concepts, Techniques, and Use
Edited by
Thomas P. Moran
Xerox Palo Alto Research Center
John M. Carroll
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University
0
CRC Press
Taylor & Francis Group
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Design rationale : concepts, techniques, and use I edited by Thomas P.
Moran, John M. Carroll.
p. em.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-8058-1566-X (c) ISBN 0-8058-1567-8 (p)
1. System design. 2. Human-computer interaction. I. Moran,
Thomas P. II. Carroll, John M.
QA76.9.S88D474 1996
004'.01'9-dc20 95-24785
CIP
Publisher's Note
The publisher has gone to great lengths to ensure the quality of this reprint
but points out that some imperfections in the original may be apparent.
Contents
1 Overview of Design Rationale 1
Thomas P. Moran and john M. Carroll
DIFFERENT PERSPECTIVES OF DESIGN RATIONALE
2 What's in Design Rationale? 21
jintae Lee and Kum-Yew Lai
3 Questions, Options, and Criteria:
Elements of Design Space Analysis 53
Allan MacLean, Richard M. Young, Victoria M. E. Bellotti,
and Thomas P. Moran
4 Deliberated Evolution: Stalking the View Matcher
in Design Space 107
john M. Carroll and Mary Beth &sson
5 Problem-Centered Design for Expressiveness
and Facility in a Graphical Programming System 147
Clayton Lewis, john Rieman, and Brigham Bell
EMPIRICAL STUDIES OF DESIGN RATIONALE
6 Analyzing the Usability of a Design Rationale Notation 185
Simon Buckingham Shum
7 The Structure of Activity During Design Meetings 217
Gary M. Olson, judith S. Olson, Marianne Storr~sten,
Mark Carter, James Herbsleb, and Henry Rueter
v
vi CONTENTS
8 Synthesis by Analysis: Five Modes of Reasoning
That Guide Design 241
Mark K Singley and john M. Carroll
DESIGN RATIONALE TOOLS IN DESIGN PRACTICE
9 Making Argumentation Serve Design 267
Gerhard Fischer, Andreas C. Lemke, Raymond McCall,
and Anders I Morch
10 Supporting Software Design: Integrating Design
Methods and Design Rationale 295
Colin Potts
11 Generative Design Rationale: Beyond the Record
and Replay Paradigm 323
Thomas R Gruber and Daniel M. Russell
USING DESIGN RATIONALE FOR TEACHING
12 Rationale in Practice: Templates for Capturing
and Applying Design Experience 351
George Casaday
13 HCI Design Rationale as a Learning Resource 373
Tom Carey, Diane McKerlie, and James Wilson
DESIGN RATIONALE IN ORGANIZATIONAL CONTEXT
14 A Process-Oriented Approach to Design Rationale 393
E. Jeffrey Conklin and KC Burgess-Yakemovic
15 Organizational Innovation and the Articulation
of the Design Space 429
Wes Sharrock and Robert Anderson
16 Evaluating Opportunities for Design Capture 453
Jonathan Grudin
Author Index 471
Reference Index 479
Subject Index 485
1
Overview of Design Rationale*
Thomas P. Moran
Xerox Palo Allo &search Center
John M. Carroll
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University
The primary goal of design is to give shape to an artifact-the product of
design. This artifact is the result of a complex of activities-the design process.
But the artifact is a concrete form that does not (except in very subtle ways)
manifest this process of creation. It does not give evidence for the motiva-
tions that initiated its design, the stated requirements, the conditions that
gave rise to its shape, the struggles and deliberations and negotiations, the
trials and reflections, the careful balancing and tradeoffs of various factors,
the reasons for its particular features, the reasons against features it does not
have, and so on. Such background information can be valuable, even critical,
to various people who deal with the artifact: not only its users and servicers,
but also its builders, marketers, and so on, as well as other designers who
want to build on the ideas. This kind of context in which design takes place
is what design rationale is about.
Thomas Moran is a cognitive/computer scientist interested in human-computer
interaction and collaborative system design, with an emphasis on supporting
informal intellectual work practices; he is Principal Scientist and Manager of the
Collaborative Systems Area at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center. John Carroll
is a cognitive psychologist interested in the analysis of human learning and
problem-solving in human-computer interaction contexts and in the design of
methods and tools for instruction and design; he is Professor of Computer Science
and Psychology and Head of the Computer Science Department at Virginia
Polytechnic Institute and State University.
*Note that chapters written in 1995 for this volume (e.g., Buckingham Shum,
1995) are listed 1995 in text and references. The actual copyright date of this
volume is 1996.
1
2 MORAN AND CARROLL
CONTENTS
1. RATIONALE IN THE DFSIGN PROCESS
1.1. The Structural Complexity of Design
1.2. Managing the Design Process
1.3. The Life Cycle of Design
1.4. Design Domains
2. DFSIGN RATIONALE
2.1. What Is Design Rationale?
2.2. The Capture, Representation, and Use of Design Rationale
3. ORGANIZATION OF THIS BOOK
3.1. Different Perspectives on Design Rationale
3.2. Empirical Studies of Design Rationale
3.3. Design Rationale Tools in Design Practice
3.4. Using Design Rationale for Teaching
3.5. Design Rationale in Organizational Context
4. TOWARD A CULTURE OF DFSIGN RATIONALE
Design rationale is the notion that design goes beyond merely accurate
descriptions of artifacts, such as specifications, and articulates and repre-
sents the reasons and the reasoning processes behind the design and
specification of artifacts. Design rationale has recently become a focus of
design research in various design domains, such as engineering design
and the design of human-computer interaction.
The purpose of this chapter is to give a brief overview of the issues
surrounding design rationale research in order to provide context for
reading any chapter in this book. Before outlining the specific contents
of the chapters in this book (in Section 3), we first consider how rationale
fits into the design process (Section 1) and define more specifically what
we mean by design rationale (Section 2). We conclude by raising some of
the social and cultural aspects of design rationale (Section 4).
1. RATIONALE IN THE DESIGN PROCESS
Design is the process of creatin'g tangible artifacts to meet intangible
human needs. The problem of design is to bridge the gap from the realm
of needs to the realm of concrete expression. The immense difficulties
involved in doing this is what gives the design process its distinctive
character and what gives relevance to a broad notion of design rationale.
Let us consider the nature of the design process in order to make clear
that it is permeated with research issues for design rationale.
1. OVERVIEW OF DESIGN RATIONALE 3
Researchers from many different fields have attempted to portray the
nature of design with both theoretical and descriptive accounts. A few of
these are major influences in current design research. From a designer's
point of view, Christopher Alexander has perhaps been the most articulate.
His early work, Notes on the Synthesis ofF orm (Alexander, 1964), characterized
design as a decomposition and resynthesis problem1; and this approach
spawned much related research in the 1960s. Herbert Simon's influential
book, The Sciences of the Artificial (Simon, 1969), gave a cognitive science
account of design, involving search in a design space. Horst Rittel (Rittel
& Weber, 1973) viewed design as a process of negotiation and deliberation,
fundamentally dealing with uncertainty and conflict; and he was the first
to propose an explicit representation of rationale. More recently, Donald
Schon (1983) characterized design from a social and ethnographic per-
spective, emphasizing the reflective nature of design.
Like other professionals, designers are well aware that they are coping
with elusive problems, searching, analyzing, synthesizing, negotiating, de-
liberating, and reflecting. Indeed, to be effective designers they must
engage in and manage all of these modes of activities.
Research Issue: In their natural modes ofp ractice, do designers spontaneously
capture information that we might consider design rationale? How do they
do it, and why do they do it?
1.1. The Structural Complexity of Design
The most obvious characteristic of the design process is that it is complex,
for the simple reason that there are so many aspects to a design problem. It
is impossible to deal with all aspects at once. Design problems have to be
broken down into manageable subproblems, which can be addressed
separately; but in practice it is not possible to find totally independent
subproblems. Simon (1962) called such systems "nearly decomposable"; and
the purpose of Alexander's (1964) decomposition method was to identify
maximally independent subproblems. One of the most complex aspects of
design is to manage the interrelations among subproblems and subsystems.
Research Issue: How can we represent not only the reasons for solutions to
subproblems, but also for the tradeoffs and compromises made to adjudicate
between the demands of the di.!Jerent subproblems?
It is typical that the needs being addressed in design work are poorly
specified-vaguely stated, usually tacit, often latent, and sometimes wrong
(people aren't sure what they want). Requirements are often wishfully
1. Alexander rejected this mathematical line of thinking and later proposed a
view of design as consisting of interlocking patterns (Alexander et al., 1977).
