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Design Requirements Engineering: A Ten-Year Perspective pp 103–136Cite as

A Proposal for a Formal Definition of the Design Concept

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Part of the Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing book series (LNBIP,volume 14)

Abstract

A clear and unambiguous definition of the design concept would be useful for developing a cumulative tradition for research on design. In this article we suggest a formal definition for the concept design and propose a conceptual model linking concepts related to design projects. The definition of design incorporates seven elements: agent, object, environment, goals, primitives, requirements and constraints. The design project conceptual model is based on the view that projects are temporal trajectories of work systems that include human agents who work to design systems for stakeholders, and use resources and tools to accomplish this task. We demonstrate how these two suggestions can be useful by showing that 1) the definition of design can be used to classify design knowledge and 2) the conceptual model can be used to classify design approaches.

Keywords

  • design
  • information systems design
  • software design project
  • requirements
  • goals
  • science of design

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Sauder School of Business, University of British Columbia, Canada

    Paul Ralph & Yair Wand

Authors
  1. Paul Ralph
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  2. Yair Wand
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, OH, USA

    Kalle Lyytinen

  2. Loughborough University, UK

    Pericles Loucopoulos

  3. University of Toronto, ON, Canada

    John Mylopoulos

  4. Georgia State University, Atlanta, GA, USA

    Bill Robinson

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© 2009 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Ralph, P., Wand, Y. (2009). A Proposal for a Formal Definition of the Design Concept. In: Lyytinen, K., Loucopoulos, P., Mylopoulos, J., Robinson, B. (eds) Design Requirements Engineering: A Ten-Year Perspective. Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, vol 14. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-92966-6_6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-92966-6_6

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-92965-9

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-92966-6

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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