Making Errors, Making Sense, Making Use

Abstract

The relationship of science to design work in a technical area, for example the design of software and its documentation, is one of those things that gets murkier as one examines it more closely. What is very clear and simple, however, is why we want to describe a close relationship between science and design. Our concrete goal is to design better solutions, better software, better instruction. But we neither wish to nor expect that we can achieve this concrete goal through trial and error, through intuition or through magic: We expect that we will have to understand how we do what we do in design, so that we can do it deliberately and repeatedly in diverse and novel situations. Moreover, we want to be able to externalize our understanding of design practice to be able to teach it to others and to work with it directly to improve it.