A Rationale-based Model for Architecture Design Reasoning

Chapter 3
Related work in design rationale
Information system design is a process of creating tangibles artefacts to meet the needs of
business and organisations. During this process, designers create or design tangible solutions
to meet intangible goals. Such creations involve creative thinking, design knowledge
as well as the designer’s interpretation and preferences. The nature of the design process
is not how things are, as in natural science, but is concerned with how things ought to
be with devising artefacts to attain goals. Goals are satisficed by better or worse designs
through searching and selecting from a set of alternatives which are not“given” but must
be synthesised [141].
Rittel and Webber [134] viewed deign as a process of negotiation and deliberation.
They suggested that design is a “wicked problem” in which it does not have a well-defined
set of potential solutions. Even though the act of design is a logical process, it is subject
to how a designer handles the wicked problem. Singley and Carroll [143] suggested five
distinct ways of bringing psychological constraints to bear on the design process. They
analysed the positive psychological effects a design promotes and the negative effects it
mitigates by using this taxonomy of design reasoning.
The choices a designer makes are a result of a design reasoning process. This design
reasoning process may differ from designer to designer, and probably would change over
time. It is often just intuitively used by designers. In order to understand this design
reasoning process, one has to examine how synthesised artefacts satisfice their design
goals. This in turn requires relevant design rationale to be made explicit for examination.
In this chapter, we examine the nature of design rationale and how it works for design
and maintenance. We summarise the current design rationale methods and discuss their
capabilities and shortcomings.
24