Simon.BuckinghamShum.net

Yesterday I was delighted to accept an invitation to speak at the British Computer Society’s Requirements Engineering Specialist Group AGM. They wanted me to reflect on the journey that I’ve been on with Design Rationale, which started with my PhD in 1988 in York/Xerox EuroPARC. Since then we’ve come a long way, and it was good to wind the clock back 22 years (yikes) and ponder how some relatively simple notational schemes for structuring deliberation (such as IBIS/gIBIS and QOC) have since matured.

The critical thing from my perspective has been that we have learnt more about:

1. developing open, flexible, software support: Compendium has >80,000 downloads by >50,000 unique users; Cohere is starting to become a practical tool; many other tools now exist
2. the nature of fluency with the tool, as reflected in lab studies, field experience codified as Dialogue Mapping, Conversational Modelling, and Knowledge Art

There are now non-trivial cases of design rationale being embedded in organisations, and not only from our strand of work of course. Much of my work has developed beyond just design rationale of course, to consider structured deliberation in schools, HE, and other contexts of organisational discourse. It is, however, also the case that DR, and structured deliberation, are not yet mainstream tools. A forthcoming blog will reflect on a recent workshop that considered some of these issues.