Two-Dimensional Positioning as a Means to Represent Strategic Knowledge in Design

In design activities such as writing and programming, problem analysis (identifying what should be constructed) and solution synthesis (how they should be integrated) depend on each other. While externalization plays an important role in such design activities, existing design support tools mainly focus on representations that serve only for solutions, but not for problems. In this paper, we present our approach of using two-dimensional positioning of objects as a representation for strategic knowledge that serves for problems. The two-dimensional positioning allows designers to produce representations that "talk back" to them without forcing them to formalize or verbalize what to be externalized. Two systems, ART for writing and RemBoard for object-oriented programming, illustrate our framework.