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.

. In this paper, we introduce a model, for developing training systems for object-oriented analysis and design, which we believe addresses the shortcomings of traditional design methods for interactive systems, when applied to this class of problem. Our model combines both the theory and methods of our research and is suitable for generalisation to a wider range of disciplines. Our chief premise is that the identification of the cognitive processes that precipitate the success or failure of an object-oriented analysis and design, can be applied to improving the usability and effectiveness of existing training techniques and tools. Such improvements would be based upon mental models derived from expert /novice comparisons, addressing the exact difficulties that designers face, using cognitive, instructional and learning theory. We expect these advances to lead a software development time/cost reduction, by providing designers with the skills required to facilitate the success of object-...

In this paper, we introduce a model for developing training systems for object-oriented analysis and design, which we believe addresses the shortcomings of traditional design methods for interactive systems, when applied to this class of problem. Our chief premise is that the identification of the cognitive processes that precipitate the success or failure of an object-oriented analysis and design, can be applied to improving the usability and effectiveness of training techniques and tools. Such improvements would be based upon mental models derived from expert/novice comparisons, addressing specific difficulties that designers face, using cognitive, instructional and learning theory. We expect these advances to lead a software development time/cost reduction, by providing designers with the skills required to facilitate the success of object-oriented projects. Keywords: Cognitive Models, Mental Models, Educational Theories, Object-Oriented Analysis and Design, Computer-Based Training...

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.