Workshops on the Science of Design

University Of Virginia Main Campus, Charlottesville VA

Investigators

Abstract

ABSTRACT 0346938 Kevin Sullivan U of Virginia The purpose of this proposal is to request support for the organization of two workshops on the Science of Design. The first workshop will be held October 12-14, 2003. It is planned for Airlie Center near Warrenton, Virginia. The second workshop will be held in the first quarter of 2004, and is also tentatively planned for Airlie Center. The workshops will support the National Science Foundation.s Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) in formulating and establishing research priorities for a science of design. The workshops will be organized based on national calls for position papers on the formulation and prioritization of research needs of the field. After a careful selection process, a diverse group of participants will be invited to each workshop to refine and develop an initial position synthesized from the contributions of the invited participants. The final product of each workshop will be a report, which will be available to National Science Foundation managers to plan and coordinate their activities, to the broad research community, and to the public. The first workshop will draw largely on researchers organized around the CISE division of Computer-Communications Research (CCR); the second will draw on the entire CISE research community. Intellectual Merit The Science of Design is perhaps unique among sciences for accommodating normative elements, and thus has the potential to create a new bridge between traditional, purely descriptive natural sciences and the normative realm of value that is today largely the domain of fields such as humanities, the arts, and religion. The disciplines of computer and information science and engineering have both the need and the means to represent norm-driven design, from the structures of designed artifacts to the behaviors of the human and organizational processes that create them.ultimately to derive appropriate design structures and processes from the consideration of explicitly represented norms.