Resonance interface: proposal of a framework for design environment

It is important to capture information about how a software design is performed. We can use this information not only to modify artifacts during the maintenance phase, but also to share or improve our ability during the design phase itself. The strategy of making designers write down their processes explicitly does not work well. Such recording activities interrupt and disturb the design process, and some implicit knowledge is involved that is difficult to represent. If we can refer to explicit representations as “points” on a time axis then, in order to capture the design process authentically, we must also treat the “lines” linking these points. We propose a resonance interface which can treat these “line-parts” of the design process. The proposal suggests an innovative human-computer interface based upon cognitive science theory. This new interface can capture the software designer´s creative work microscopically by using a primitive dynamic “image schema”. It is possible to compact and also to integrate the fragments of the software design process in terms of these image schemas. In this paper, we present the effectiveness of our resonance interface from the viewpoint of its usability and its capability to capture and record design processes. The former is related to what is known as the designer´s tacit knowledge acquisition. The latter is related to consolidation of the captured knowledge on a higher level