Designing across discipline borders : obstacle or option?

Educating technological designers is difficult. An educational curriculum should provide both sufficient discipline-related skills, and cross-disciplinary skills. In order to argue about the balance between the two, we speculate on the relation between disciplines and application domains, and we give some considerations as to what disciplinary baggage gives the best preparation for prospect interdisciplinary designers. Finally, we hint at a particular role for software designers in the process of designing across discipline borders

An operational model for design processes

In this paper we concentrate on the conceptual construction of an architecture of the artefact to be designed (ATBD). The architecture forms the skeleton for all subsequent design stages; design support systems therefore require a representation of this architecture [4]. The fact that design problems are under-defined and open-ended complicates architectural design [5]. Even at the end of the architecture phase many alternatives are left open. It is often necessary to consider several of these alternatives and then to compare their suitabilit

Is there an ethics of algorithms?

We argue that some algorithms are value-laden, and that two or more persons who accept different value-judgments may have a rational reason to design such algorithms differently. We exemplify our claim by discussing a set of algorithms used in medical image analysis: In these algorithms it is often necessary to set certain thresholds for whether e.g. a cell should count as diseased or not, and the chosen threshold will partly depend on the software designer’s preference between avoiding false positives and false negatives. This preference ultimately depends on a number of value-judgments. In the last section of the paper we discuss some general principles for dealing with ethical issues in algorithm-design