Supporting Concurrent Design Teams with Adjustably Autonomous Agents

Extended Abstract Successful deployment of knowledge-based systems in design is very limited. It has been suggested that one reason for this is that models of design have focused upon what machines can do and not on how designers actually design. [1]. The Cognitive Engineering Research Programme launched by the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council in 1995 is seeking to achieve this goal by developing a better understanding of how we should design interactive systems through studying people and organisations. Oxman [2] offers an approach to this through the development of an integrated understanding of design theory, cognitive science and computing. This paper describes work which attempts to address some of the issues above by studying concurrent engineering designers to identify (some of) the dynamics of the concurrent design process and examine ways in which these might be captured in computational approaches to support design activity.