This grant funds a workshop that will bring together invited participants from both the software design community and the general design community aimed at improving out understanding of how software designers tackle early design problems, as formed through a broad range of perspectives including problem solving strategies, representations, communication patterns and language use, and different forms of knowledge that are applied. Expert designers will be videotaped to capture how they think, apply knowledge, make decisions and communicate. The grant will fund the videotaping sessions, transcription of the videotapes, and publication. At a subsequent workshop, participants will submit papers that analyze the videotapes/transcripts from a variety of different perspectives, discuss these papers at the workshop, and produce an edited book covering revised chapters and discussions. The approach to studying design is patterned after the Delft design workshop.
