Strategic Argumentation: a method of approach

One of the challenges of the design process is to develop a strategy that enables designers to gain insight from practice-based research that can be used to carry the development of a project forward to its realisation. In this paper we draw on the theory of strategic argumentation as a way to reason about and plan the manner in which design products should function in a particular set of circumstances. For the purposes of this research we focus on the creation of a social-based software system that supports the reading and learning activities of students in an educational setting. By necessity this reasoned approach involves the participation of project stakeholders and potential end-users of the system. This is an important distinction as we look to the end-user community who know the form of a product from practical experience and are guided by the knowledge garnered from user-centered experiments that examined students’ readings styles and strategies. The outcome of this research illustrates the role of argument-based reasoning as a method of passing judgment regarding the type of design decisions that should be made. We illustrate this method through a case study example that begins with an initial design proposal used to explore end-user activities and discuss how our research findings led the iterative development of an interactive prototype tool.