Over the past 3 years, the PIs have studied designing through exercises and games, retrospective narratives, and participant-observation of product development in engineering firms. They have proposed a Constraint Model of design that treats designing as a search within a field of constraints, and have developed prototype software for a design assistant using this model. Based on these studies, three specific experiments are planned. The experiments will test strategies for representing and organizing design knowledge in the Constraint Model; explore the model's uses and limits as a design assistant; probe designers' knowledge and test the ability to express this knowledge in rules congenial to the model.
