This article presents a cognitively oriented viewpoint on design. It focuses on cognitive, dynamic aspects of real design, that is, the actual cognitive activity implemented by designers during their work on professional design projects. Rather than conceiving designing as problem solving—Simon's symbolic information processing (SIP) approach—or as a reflective practice or some other form of situated activity—the situativity (SIT) approach—we consider that, from a cognitive viewpoint, designing is most appropriately characterised as a construction of representations. After a critical discussion of the SIP and SIT approaches to design, we present our viewpoint. This presentation concerns the evolving nature of representations regarding levels of abstraction and degrees of precision, the function of external representations, and specific qualities of representation in collective design. Designing is described at three levels: the organisation of the activity, its strategies, and its design-representation construction activities (different ways to generate, transform, and evaluate representations). Even if we adopt a "generic design" stance, we claim that design can take different forms depending on the nature of the artefact, and we propose some candidates for dimensions that allow a distinction to be made between these forms of design. We discuss the potential specificity of HCI design, and the lack of cognitive design research occupied with the quality of design. We close our discussion of representational structures and activities by an outline of some directions regarding their functional linkages.

This paper presents an approach to the study of cognitive activities in collaborative software development. This approach has been developed by a multidisciplinary team made up of software engineers and cognitive psychologists. The basis of this approach is to improve our understanding of software development by observing professionals at work. The goal is to derive lines of conduct or good practices based on observations and analyses of the processes that are naturally used by software engineers. The strategy involved is derived from a standard approach in cognitive science. It is based on the videotaping of the activities of software engineers, transcription of the videos, coding of the transcription, defining categories from the coded episodes and defining cognitive behaviors or dialogs from the categories. This project presents two original contributions that make this approach generic in software engineering. The first contribution is the introduction of a formal hierarchical coding scheme, which will enable comparison of various types of observations. The second is the merging of psychological and statistical analysis approaches to build a cognitive model. The details of this new approach are illustrated with the initial data obtained from the analysis of technical review meetings.

Willemien Visser; Organisation of design activities: opportunistic, with hierarchical episodes, Interacting with Computers, Volume 6, Issue 3, 1 September