Design Spaces and How Software Designers Use Them: a sampler

TL;DR

This paper explores the concept of 'design spaces' in software design, illustrating how they help capture knowledge, analyze options, and support decision-making in the design process.

Contribution

It provides a sampler of how software designers interpret and utilize design spaces, demonstrating their role in reducing complexity and aiding systematic decisions.

Findings

Design spaces serve as lenses to focus on relevant design options.

They help capture domain knowledge and analyze design alternatives.

Design spaces support systematic decision making in software design.

Abstract

Discussions of software design often refer to using "design spaces" to describe the spectrum of available design alternatives. This supports design thinking in many ways: to capture domain knowledge, to support a wide variety of design activity, to analyze or predict properties of alternatives, to understand interactions and dependencies among design choices. We present a sampling of what designers, especially software designers, mean when they say "design space" and provide examples of the roles their design spaces serve in their design activity. This shows how design spaces can serve designers as lenses to reduce the overall space of possibilities and support systematic design decision making.