Exploration Through Example

Example-driven development, Agile testing, context-driven testing, Agile programming, Ruby, and other things of interest to Brian Marick

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Wed, 01 Oct 2003

The Science of Design

At Ralph Johnson's suggestion, I wrote a position paper for a National Science Foundation workshop on the science of design. ("The workshop objective is to help the NSF better define the field and its major open problems and to prioritize important research issues.")

On the principle that no good deed should go unblogged, here's a PDF copy of my position paper, "A Social Science of Design".

My position is that one Science of Design should be a science of people doing design... more akin to anthropology or social studies of scientific practice than to physics... A successful research program would win the Jolt software productivity award as well as help someone gain tenure.

The last time I was at a "how should government fund software research" workshop, I had absolutely no effect with a similarly iconoclastic and populist proposal. If I'm accepted this time, we'll see if my presentation and argumentation skills have improved in the last two decades. (They can't have gotten worse.)

## Posted at 08:13 in category /misc [permalink] [top]