How a Simple Card Game Influences Design Reasoning: A Reflective Method
Summary
In this Master thesis a reflective card game is developed to help designers improve their design reasoning. Software design is a highly complex activity in which many factors have to be taken into consideration; stakeholders, the teams abilities, and available technologies are just a few. The decisions designers make during software design are also important for the software development as a whole. If decisions made at this stage lead to problems later on development work will need to be fixed, costing time and money. The quality of design decisions is based on the reasoning that underlies the decision making process, and so in order to improve design decisions more thorough reasoning needs to be applied.
For the development of a reflective method to help designers during their design discourse several experiments are run. The experiments are to test if the reflective method has a significant influence on design reasoning. We focus on professional and student designers to represent experience and inexperience, and have them fulfil a software architecture assignment. The student and professional groups are then divided into test and control groups, with the test groups using the cards in order to see its effect on design reasoning. The differences between the groups are measured using qualitative analysis, with the student results also including quantitative analysis to find any significant differences.
The card game is based on rational decision making and reflective thinking. Rational decision making is careful evaluation of the situation before making a decision, and this is different from naturalistic decision making, which is intuitive. In many cases naturalistic decision making works well, but in an unstructured and complex situation such as software design this kind of decision making is not sufficient. Designers need to use rational decision making which means thorough reasoning, this involves deliberate thinking and discussing of alternative solutions and finding the optimal one. Designers can be encouraged to use rational decision making by use of reflective questions in the form of reasoning techniques like assumption or risk analysis. With reflective thinking designers are prompted to re-evaluate their decisions and think critically whether the right choice has been made. These reasoning techniques have been represented in a card form and are used to trigger the designers into reflection, and ultimately rational decision making.
Our results show that for the student groups the card game has a significant influence when it comes to improving thorough reasoning, making the reflective method a success. But there are also some discrepancies regarding the identification of design problems and constraints which are interesting subjects for further research. For the professional groups, our results are inconclusive but show many of the same patterns as the student groups, though to a lesser degree.