Designerly Thinking: What Software Methodology can learn from Design Theory

  • Authors:
  • Paul Taylor

  • Affiliations:
  • -

  • Venue:
  • SMT '00 Proceedings of the International Conference on software Methods and Tools (SMT'00)
  • Year:
  • 2000

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Abstract

Design lies at the core of software creation and construction. Software methodology has traditionally conceptualized design as an engineering process, and attempted to express the design act as process steps and model transformations. This paper examines design fromthe rather different perspective of the non-software domains-architecture, industrial design and the academic design disciplines that have spawned 'design science'. This community dealt with design methods in the nineteen sixties and seventies, and has subsequently moved on to more relative and holistic views of design that integrate artefact and context closely. Three themes dominate the comparative excursion into this territory-the inappropriateness of process to prescribe the act of synthesis, the need to consider the product's wider context including its history and social context, and the need to legitimise and manage internal ways of transferring designs, design expertise and design languages. A case is made for a broader based notion ofsoftware design, a kind of 'designerly thinking' to help balance the intense demands on modern software product development, quality, and use.