A Survey of Architecture Design Rationale

Many claims have been made about the problems caused by not documenting design rationale. The general perception is that designers and architects usually do not fully understand the critical role of systematic use and capture of design rationale. However, there is to date little empirical evidence available on what design rationale mean to practitioners, how valuable they consider them, and how they use and document design rationale during the design process. This paper reports an empirical study that surveyed practitioners to probe their perception of the value of design rationale and how they use and document background knowledge related to their design decisions. Based on eighty-one valid responses, this study has discovered that practitioners recognize the importance of documenting design rationale and frequently use them to reason about their design choices. However, they have indicated barriers to the use and documentation of design rationale. Based on the findings, we conclude that much research is needed to develop methodology and tool support for design rationale capture and usage. Furthermore, we put forward some research questions that would benefit from further investigation into design rationale in order to support practice in industry

Reducing the complexity of the software design process with object-oriented design

Designing software is a complex process. How object-oriented design (OOD), coupled with formalized documentation and tailored object diagraming techniques, can reduce the complexity of the software design process is described and illustrated. The described OOD methodology uses a hierarchical decomposition approach in which parent objects are decomposed into layers of lower level child objects. A method of tracking the assignment of requirements to design components is also included. Increases in the reusability, portability, and maintainability of the resulting products are also discussed. This method was built on a combination of existing technology, teaching experience, consulting experience, and feedback from design method users. The discussed concepts are applicable to hierarchal OOD processes in general. Emphasis is placed on improving the design process by documenting the details of the procedures involved and incorporating improvements into those procedures as they are developed

A MultiAgent System for Choosing Software Patterns

Software patterns enable an efficient transfer of design experience by documenting common solutions to recurring design problems. They contain valuable knowledge that can be reused by others, in particular, by less experienced developers. Patterns have been published for system architecture and detailed design, as well as for specific application domains (e.g. agents and security). However, given the steadily growing number of patterns in the literature and online repositories, it can be hard for non-experts to select patterns appropriate to their needs, or even to be aware of the existing patterns. In this paper, we present a multi-agent system that supports developers in choosing patterns that are suitable for a given design problem. The system implements an implicit culture approach for recommending patterns to developers based on the history of decisions made by other developers regarding which patterns to use in related design problems. The recommendations are complemented with the documents from a pattern repository that can be accessed by the agents. The paper includes a set of experimental results obtained using a repository of security patterns. The results prove the viability of the proposed approach

Designing Dental Student Portfolios to Assess Performance

The purpose of this poster is to share a project developed by Marquette University’s liaisons to the American Dental Education Association’s Commission on Change and Innovation in Dental Education with others interested in learning about the use of portfolios to assess the quality of student performance in dental school. Sample components from the pilot portfolios will be integrated into the poster to provide participants with a view from portfolio design to completion. Portfolios are becoming a more common method of assessing the quality of student performance in health professions education. Portfolios can assist in documenting evidence of specific competencies at the student level and also serve as a longitudinal measure of a student’s development

Findings from the Workshop on User-Centered Design of Language Archives

This white paper describes findings from the workshop on User-Centered Design of Language Archives organized in February 2016 by Christina Wasson (University of North Texas) and Gary Holton (University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa). It reviews relevant aspects of language archiving and user-centered design to construct the rationale for the workshop, relates key insights produced during the workshop, and outlines next steps in the larger research trajectory initiated by this workshop. The purpose of this white paper is to make all of the findings from the workshop publicly available in a short time frame, and without the constraints of a journal article concerning length, audience, format, and so forth. Selections from this white paper will be used in subsequent journal articles. So much was learned during the workshop; we wanted to provide a thorough documentation to ensure that none of the key insights would be lost. We consider this document a white paper because it provides the foundational insights and initial conceptual frameworks that will guide us in our further research on the user-centered design of language archives. We hope this report will be useful to members of all stakeholder groups seeking to develop user-centered designs for language archives.U.S. National Science Foundation Documenting Endangered Languages Program grants BCS-1543763 and BCS-1543828

Deborah Balters / BA in Architecture, 2007 / M.Arch 2011 + Sofia Balters / BA in Architecture, 2010

Before & After 2002: An Abridged Campus Archive Documenting the Tenure of Ren Levy | Lead Book Designers at Diller Scofidio + Renfro, Spring 2013 Deborah and Sofia Balters worked under the guidance of Elizabeth Diller to design and produce a tome documenting the evolution of the Lincoln Center campus over the last six decades. It was presented as a gift to Lincoln Center’s departing president, Reynold Levy in 2013. The book measures 7” by 10.5” large and 8” thick, weighs 18 lbs, and contains 2424 hand-bound pages of visual and written content. Its 24 chapters portray physical and ephemeral transitions that occurred on campus, documenting ‘Before and After’ Ren. ‘Before’ records a memory of the original construction at Lincoln Center and documents the campus’ inception and evolution up until Ren’s appointment as president. These pages are creme colored, serif fonted and demure. The ‘After’ section breaks from the architectural archive and is glossy, colored and dynamic. Images jump across each page; content sections are experiential. The dense volume demonstrates the impact DS+R’s renovation, and Reynold Levy’s tenure, had on Lincoln Center.https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/wia_profiles/1040/thumbnail.jp

Design and prototyping of real-time systems using CSP and CML

A procedure for systematic design of event based systems is introduced by means of the Production Cell case study. The design is documented by CSP-style processes, which allow both verification using formal techniques and also validation of a rapid prototype in the functionallanguage CML. 1. Introduction Notations like CSP [1] or CCS [2] provide concise notations for documenting the design of reactive or real-time systems. These notations further allow verification of properties through calculation, or model checking [3]. Yet there is a sizable gap from such specifications to executable programs needed to validate or test the design [4, 5, 6, 7]. In this paper we demonstrate how this gap is closed by CML [8], an extension of ML [9]. As shown in this paper, it is easy to get from a CSP design to an executable CML program, and the program can be interfaced to programs in other programming languages. We illustrate this idea by applying the design method for real-time systems presented in..

American Innovation: Preserving and Providing Access to 80 Years of Industrial Design History

From washing machines to computers, and sports cars to space capsules, America's infatuation with invention has fueled industrial design. Design history helps us understand American culture in a whole new way. By engaging an interdisciplinary team of diverse experts, Art Center College of Design proposes to advance historical knowledge of American culture through an archival preservation and access management pilot project. As the country's leading school of industrial design, Art Center archives include photos, films, and print material documenting American innovation over an 80-year period. New policies and procedures will be tested for digitization and public access, while immediately preserving assets at greatest risk for deterioration. The pilot project will build Art Center Archives' organizational capacity to ensure that the history of American innovation and imagination can be told for years to come

Teaching photonic integrated circuits with Jupyter notebooks : design, simulation, fabrication

At Ghent University, we have built a course curriculum on integrated photonics, and in particular silicon photonics, based on interactive Jupyter Notebooks. This has been used in short workshops, specialization courses at PhD level, as well as the M.Sc. Photonics Engineering program at Ghent University and the Free University of Brussels. The course material teaches the concepts of on-chip waveguides, basic building blocks, circuits, the design process, fabrication and measurements. The Jupyter notebook environment provides an interface where static didactic content (text, figures, movies, formulas) is mixed with Python code that the user can modify and execute, and interactive plots and widgets to explore the effect of changes in circuits or components. The Python environment supplies a host of scientific and engineering libraries, while the photonic capabilities are based on IPKISS, a commercial design framework for photonic integrated circuits by Luceda Photonics. The IPKISS framework allows scripting of layout and simulation directly from the Jupyter notebooks, so the teaching modules contain live circuit simulation, as well as integration with electromagnetic solvers. Because this is a complete design framework, students can also use it to tape out a small chip design which is fabricated through a rapid prototyping service and then measured, allowing the students to validate the actual performance of their design against the original simulation. The scripting in Jupyter notebooks also provides a self-documenting design flow, and the use of an established design tool guarantees that the acquired skills can be transferred to larger, real-world design projects

Soil and water bioengineering: practice and research needs for reconciling natural hazard control and ecological restoration

Soil and water bioengineering is a technology that encourages scientists and practitioners to combine their knowledge and skills in the management of ecosystems with a common goal to maximize benefits to both man and the natural environment. It involves techniques that use plants as living building materials, for: (i) natural hazard control (e.g., soil erosion, torrential floods and landslides) and (ii) ecological restoration or nature-based re-introduction of species on degraded lands, river embankments, and disturbed environments. For a bioengineering project to be successful, engineers are required to highlight all the potential benefits and ecosystem services by documenting the technical, ecological, economic and social values. The novel approaches used by bioengineers raise questions for researchers and necessitate innovation from practitioners to design bioengineering concepts and techniques. Our objective in this paper, therefore, is to highlight the practice and research needs in soil and water bioengineering for reconciling natural hazard control and ecological restoration. Firstly, we review the definition and development of bioengineering technology, while stressing issues concerning the design, implementation, and monitoring of bioengineering actions. Secondly, we highlight the need to reconcile natural hazard control and ecological restoration by posing novel practice and research questions