Design environments that could offer flexible interactive support for different design paradigms hold great potential for increasing the effectiveness of designers of large, complex systems. The Brown CISE Institutional Infrastructure project aims to develop such environments, by achieving the following research goals: 1. supporting in a consistent way a variety of design paradigms in a single environment, 2. providing system tools that facilitate the interaction of teams of designers working on complex tasks, 3. developing and implementing new paradigms suitable for design problems, 4. testing the concepts and tools in the problem domains of software development and VLSI design. GARDEN, the prototype multiparadigm programming environment developed at Brown, will be the central testbed for the research. Research in object-oriented databases, concurrency tools, parallel algorithms for graphics, and logic and object-oriented programming paradigms will also be instrumental in achieving the research goals.
