A ground-breaking, multi-disciplinary volume describing the essence of all design fields, ranging from artistic design to systems design, to educational or instructional design.

A book that lays out the fundamental concepts of design culture and outlines a design-driven way to approach the world. Humans did not discover fire—they designed it. Design is not defined by software programs, blueprints, or font choice. When we create new things—technologies, organizations, processes, systems, environments, ways of thinking—we engage in design. With this expansive view of design as their premise, in The Design Way Harold Nelson and Erik Stolterman make the case for design as its own culture of inquiry and action. They offer not a recipe for design practice or theorizing but a formulation of design culture's fundamental core of ideas. These ideas—which form “the design way”—are applicable to an infinite variety of design domains, from such traditional fields as architecture and graphic design to such nontraditional design areas as organizational, educational, interaction, and healthcare design. The text of this second edition is accompanied by new detailed images, “schemas” that visualize, conceptualize, and structure the authors' understanding of design inquiry. The text itself has been revised and expanded throughout, in part in response to reader feedback.

This textbook brings together both new and traditional research methods in Human Computer Interaction (HCI). Research methods include interviews and observations, ethnography, grounded theory and analysis of digital traces of behavior. Readers will gain an understanding of the type of knowledge each method provides, its disciplinary roots and how each contributes to understanding users, user behavior and the context of use. The background context, clear explanations and sample exercises make this an ideal textbook for graduate students, as well as a valuable reference for researchers and practitioners. 'It is an impressive collection in terms of the level of detail and variety.' (M. Sasikumar, ACM Computing Reviews #CR144066)

Publisher description

Computer-Aided Design has progressed from being concerned initially with analysis and evaluation through graphic representation and geometric modelling, to a concern with the design tasks themselves. The role of Expert Systems in performing complex design tasks is examined in this book. Here, expert systems have been defined rather broadly: any system which embodies expert knowledge explicitly and utilises reasoning processes as its computational process. The topics covered include system architectures, representation tools, applications, and specific design concerns. The papers demonstrate the wide variety of knowledge engineering tools needed in computer-aided design.

"This book is meant to provide an introduction to the controlled use of abstraction in planning and designing computer programs"--Preface