This text adopts a cognitive viewpoint on design, focusing on individually conducted activities actually implemented in professional, industrial design projects. It presents elements for a cognitive descriptive model of design that, on the one hand, furthers our understanding of design, and on the other hand, offers elements to people who wish to use such knowledge in order to advance education and practice of professional designers. The text is especially concerned with dynamic aspects of design —that is, it focuses on the activity implemented by designers, especially the cognitive processes and/or strategies they use — rather than with static aspects. Section 1 presents the classical cognitive viewpoint on design, that is, the symbolic information-processing (SIP) approach, represented by Herbert A. Simon. Section 2 focuses on the main alternative to the SIP approach for design, i.e. the "situativity " (SIT) approach, mainly represented by Donald Schön. Section 3 is the main division of this text. It presents nuances and critiques with respect to both SIP and SIT approaches, and completes and integrates these two approaches into our own cognitively oriented dynamic approach to design.

First and foremost I would like to thank my advisor, Alex Kirlik. As this project has traveled through numerous literatures and tried to find a balance between cognitive psychology and software engineering, he has really helped to get to the bottom of what matters and is important. He has always had something useful to provide despite not having a background in software engineering or the psychology of programming, and his perspectives have shaped this project. I would like to thank Ralph Johnson for providing advice and suggestions and for inspiring me to be interested in software design and the topic of this thesis. I would like to thank my roommates for helping me practice presentations, proof materials, figure out statistics, and whatever else I needed help with at a moments notice. I would like to thank my all of my friends who were willing to be participants, especially the two willing to be unpaid pilot participants. I would like to thank Susan Garnsey for teaching me what a research life is like and for always having something kind, understanding, and constructive to say no matter what the situation. I would like to Colleen Conley for having a handout for every question and all of the psych honors students for being good comrades. And finally I would like to thank my parents for always being supportive of everything I do.

A. PROJECT SUMMARY Interactive computing systems are only as good as the tasks that they support. Designers of interactive systems have recognized this and begun to incorporate use-oriented design representations into their system development activities. One such representation is a task scenario, a narrative describing one or more users interacting with a computer to accomplish some task. But despite the increasing importance of scenarios to design practice—they can be used to express requirements, to envision new designs, to communicate design ideas to users, to evaluate prototype systems, to test theoretical models—there is no systematic, integrative methodology or framework to guide this practice. Scenario generation and application remains an art. This research seeks to develop such a framework. It uses converging methods to systematize the concept of task scenario, to articulate the properties that make a scenario good for one design activity vs. another, and to develop tools and techniques that will guide designers in effective and efficient application of these use-oriented design representations. Studies of scenarios created in representative design projects, combined

: An intelligent tutoring system (ITS) is, in principle, well suited for instructional experimentation as the automated environment allows for controlled variation of variables. These variables, aspects of the instructional and domain models, can be varied by replacing parts representing these aspects by other parts. However, if ITSs are to be used as vehicles for instructional experimentation the architecture, the knowledge representation, and the authoring environment should fulfil additional requirements. This paper discusses the requirements for experimentation-directed ITSs, the shell for ITS development and the scalable instructional method specification (SIMS) paradigm. Keywords: Authoring Language, Computer programming, Experimental Study, Instructional Design Environment, Intelligent Tutoring Systems, Object-Oriented Design. Contents 1 Introduction 2 Instructional experimentation with computers 2.1 Need for instructional experimentation 2.2 Opportunities of experimentatio...

Abstract. The use of UML diagrams and associated methodologies in the development of software applications has, on the one hand been presented as a standard, while on the other hand has been criticized by empiricists who have actually studied its usage. In this paper, we describe a useful empirical method to analyze data about the nature, extent, and quality of cognitive support that the use of UML diagrams provides to a software developer. The data was collected and analyzed in a controlled experimental setup from both experienced and novice users. Our approach to analysing data in this study has the potential for wide applicability in empirical validation studies where focus on the process of usage is important.

Managing change in an information systems development organization: understanding developer transitions from a structured to an object-oriented development environment 1

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