Making Argumentation Serve Design
Gerhard Fischer, Andreas Lemke, Raymond J. McCall, Anders I. Mørch · Human-Computer Interaction · 1991
268 Documenting argumentation (i.e., design rationale) has great potential for serving design. Despite this potential benefit, our analysis of Horst Rittel&s;s and Donald Schön&s;s design theories and our own experience has shown that there are the following fundamental obstacles to the effective documentation and use of design rationale: (a) A rationale representation scheme must be found that organizes information according to its relevance to the task at hand; (b) computer support is needed to reduce the burden of recording and using rationale; (c) argumentative and constructive design activities must be explicitly linked by integrated design environments; and(d) design rationale must be reusable. In this chapter, we present the evolution of our conceptual frameworks and systems toward integrated design environments, describe a prototype of an integrated design environment including its underlying architecture, and discuss some current and future work on extending it.