Making sense of design & requirements perspectives - & their inter-relations

This NSF Design Requirements Workshop has a very ambitious and wide-ranging set of objectives. It invites contributions from a wide range of disciplines and encourages a variety of perspectives on requirements and design, as applied to socio-technical systems. In attempting to position myself in relation to the Workshop themes and objectives as outlined in the invitation letter, I have extracted certain key sentences from the letter to frame my remarks here. The organizers ask for ideas on “ how to address the diverse and multidisciplinary realities of software intensive designs in the 21st Century”, and wish to include social and organizational, as well as technical perspectives. They also request us to explore “the envisioned future of requirements in a variety of design contexts” and the issues involved in “managing design requirements in heterogeneous and rapidly-changing environments”. They are also open to “the ways in which modern systems design can be informed by ideas from a range design fields (e.g., engineering, architecture, economics, and the arts).” I have highlighted these excerpts as they relate most closely to some of my own concerns and expertise. Similarly, I have pulled out 2 of the 8 listed objectives as ones on which I might be able to make a contribution at the Workshop, namely: Elaborating the need for new avenues in requirements research – the new landscape and emergent challenges; and Promoting intellectual cross-fertilization across disciplines in design and requirements