Design Rationale - History

History

While argumentation formats can be traced back to Stephen Toulmin's work in the 1950s datums, claims, warrants, backings and rebuttals, the origin of design rationale can be traced back to W.R. Kunz and Horst Rittel's development of the Issue-Based Information System (IBIS) notation in 1970. Several variants on IBIS have since been proposed.

  • The first was Procedural Hierarchy of Issues (PHI), first described in Ray McCall’s PhD Dissertation although not named at the time.
  • IBIS was also modified, in this case to support Software Engineering, by Potts & Bruns. The Potts & Bruns approach was then extended by the Decision Representation Language (DRL). which itself was extended by RATSpeak.
  • Questions Options and Criteria (QOC), also known as Design Space Analysis is an alternative representation for argumentation-based rationale, as are Win-Win and the Decision Recommendation and Intent Model (DRIM).

The first Rationale Management System (RMS) was PROTOCOL, which supported PHI, which was followed by other PHI-based systems MIKROPOLIS and PHIDIAS. The first system providing IBIS support was Hans Dehlinger’s STIEC. Rittel developed a small system in 1983 (also not published) and the better known gIBIS (graphical IBIS) was developed in 1987.

Not all successful DR approaches involve structured argumentation. For example, Carroll and Rosson's Scenario-Claims Analysis approach captures rationale in scenarios that describe how the system is used and how well the system features support the user goals. Carroll and Rosson's approach to design rationale is intended to help designers of computer software and hardware identify underlying design tradeoffs and make inferences about the impact of potential design interventions.

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