Accession Number:

ADA210266

Title:

Motivating the Notion of Generic Design within Information Processing Theory: the Design Problem Space

Descriptive Note:

Technical rept. Dec 1987-1988

Corporate Author:

CALIFORNIA UNIV BERKELEY SCHOOL OF EDUCATION

Personal Author(s):

• Goel, Vinod
• Pirolli, Peter

Report Date:

1988-12-09

Pagination or Media Count:

46.0

Abstract:

This paper makes a preliminary attempt to differentiate design problem solving from non-design problem solving by identifying major invariants in the design problem space. There are four major steps in the strategy 1 characterize design as a radial category and flesh out the task environment of the central or prototypical cases 2 take the design task environment seriously 3 explicate the impact of this task environment on the design problem space 4 argue that, given the structure of the information processing system as a constant, the features noted in the problem spaces of design tasks will not all occur in problem spaces where the task environment is vastly different. This analysis leads to the claim that these features are invariants in the problem spaces of design situations, and collectively constitute a design problem space. Descriptive protocol studies are used to explore the problem spaces of three prototypical design tasks from the disciplines of architecture, mechanical engineering, and instructional design.

Descriptors:

• *INFORMATION PROCESSING
• *INFORMATION THEORY
• *PROTOTYPES
• INSTRUCTIONS
• ARCHITECTURE
• PROBLEM SOLVING
• INFORMATION SYSTEMS
• ENVIRONMENTS
• MECHANICAL ENGINEERING

Subject Categories:

• Cybernetics
• Human Factors Engineering and Man Machine Systems

Distribution Statement:

APPROVED FOR PUBLIC RELEASE