Summary For Robbins Design Critiquing Systems

  • What are Critiquing Systems?
    • Langlotz and Shortliffe describing ONCOCIN: "A critique is an explanation of the significant differences between the plan that would have been proposed by the expert system and the plan proposed by the user".
    • Miller on ATTENDING: "A critiquing system is a computer program that critiques human generated solutions".
    • Fischer et al. on Janus: "Critics operationalize Schoen's concept of a situation that talks back. They use knowledge of design principles to detect and critique suboptimal solutions constructed by the designer"
    • Silvermann and Mehzer describing their theory of error and critiquing: "Exper critiquing systems are a class of program that receive as input the statement of the problem and the user-proposed solution. They produce as output a critique of the user's judgement and knowledge in terms of what the program thinks is wrong with the user_proposed solution"
    • Sumner, Bonnardel, and Kallalk describing VDDE: "Critiquing systems embedded in [design] environments augment designer's cognitive processes by analyzing design solutions for compliance with criteria and constraints encoded in the system's knowledge-base"
    • Jason E. Robbins: "a design critic is an intelligent user interface mechanism embedded in a design tool that analyzes a design in the context of decision-making and provides feedback to help the designer improve the design."
  • Phases of ADAIR process:
    • Activate: an appropriate subset of all available critics is selected for activation. Critics that are relevant and timely to the designer's current decisions should be activated so as to support those decisions.
    • Detect: active critics detect assistance opportunities and generate advice. The most common type of assistance opportunity is the identifiaction of a syntactic or simple semantic error. Other opportunities for assistance include identifying incompletness in the design, identifying violations of style guidelines, delivery of exprt advice relevant to design decisions.
    • Advise: design feedback items are presented to advise the desginer of the problem and possible improvements, Much of the potential benifit of critiquing is associated with this phase: the feedback item improves the designer's understanding of the status of the desgin, the explanation provided improves the designer's knowledge of the domain, and the designer is directed to fix problems. This ultimately results in more knowledgeable designers and better designs thathave fewer errors and better conformance to stylistic conventions.
    • Improve: Design support systems can aid designers in making improvements or corrective automations that fix the identified problem (semi-)automatically.
    • Record: The resolution of each feedback item is recorded so that it may inform future decision making. Having a record of problem resolutions is important later in design because each design decision interacts with others. Often a design change that fixes one problem causes another probelm. when a new problem is identified designers often need to know why the problem arose, or they risk reintroducing problems that had previously been resolved.

  • Comparative critiquing supports designers by pointing out differences between the proposed design and a design generated by alternative means, for example a planning system with extensive domain knowledge. In this respect, comparative critiquing systems are similar to tutoring systems and suffer from the same authoring costs and domain size limitations. Pointing out differences can lead designers to make their design more like the generated design or cause them to re-examine their reasons for making different decisions. Comparative critiuqes can be confusing when multiple good solutions exist that are very different from each other.

  • Analytic critiquing uses rules to detect assistance opportunities, such as problems in the design. This aids designers by guiding them away from recognized problems rather than guiding them to known solutions. In general, analytic critics can be built incrmentally and applied throughout the design process. Subtantial domain knowledge is needed to implement analytic critics, but they need not have access to a generated solution. This allows analytic critics to be applied to a broader range of domains.

  • Critique categories:
    • Correctness critics: detect syntactic and semantic flaws
    • Completness critics remind the designer to complete design tasks
    • Consistency critics point out contradictions within the design
    • Optimization critics suggest better values for design parameters
    • Alternative critics prompt the architect to consider alternatives to a given design decision.
    • Evolvability critics address issues, such as modularation, that effect the effort needed to change the design over time.
    • Presentation critics look for awkward use of notation that reduces readability.
    • Tool critics inform the desiner of other available design tools at the times when those tools are useful.
    • Experiential critics provide reminders of pas experiences with similar designs or design elements.
    • Organizational critics express the interst of other stakeholders in the development organization.
-- LeNguyenThinh -- 07 Dec 2004
 
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