Abstract

The Design of Design

Designing computers, graphics hardware, programming languages, operating systems, and big applications systems seems to have a lot in common, across those diverse media. These same commonalities also occur in the processes of designing buildings, and even organizations. In disciplines such as building architecture, mechanical engineering, and industrial design, there is currently a lot of study of the design process, and 25 years of research literature. Perhaps computer scientists, and indeed all designers, can learn from these older design disciplines.

Four major trends have changed design substantially since WWII, and strikingly since the 19th century:

• design by designers who could not themselves make the designed object,
• design by teams, sometimes geographically dispersed,
• the capture of designs in computer models, besides or instead of drawings, and
• the promulgation of formal design models and processes.

We essay some analysis of these trends. Analysis inevitably generates opinions on how design should be done, and how it should be taught.

Short Bio:

Frederick P. Brooks, Jr., is Kenan Professor of Computer Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He was an architect of the IBM Stretch and Harvest computers. He was Corporate Project Manager for the System/360, including development of the System/360 computer family hardware, and the Operating System/360 software. He founded the Department of Computer Science in 1964 and chaired it for 20 years. His research there has been in computer architecture, software engineering, and interactive 3-D computer graphics ("virtual reality"). His best-known books are The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering, and Computer Architecture: Concepts and Evolution (with G.A. Blaauw, 1997). Dr. Brooks has received the National Medal of Technology, the Bower Award and Prize of the Franklin Institute, the John von Neumann Medal of the IEEE, and the Allen Newell and Distinguished Service awards of the ACM. He is a Distinguished Fellow of the British Computer Society and a Foreign Member of the Royal Academy of Engineering.

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