Chapter 11 - Scenario-Based Design: A Brief History and Rationale

Abstract

This chapter considers why scenarios became so pre-eminent in software design. Interestingly, the main historical root emanates from strategic planning, not design studies; perhaps this is the legacy of the new-design methods. Also interestingly, the foundations and rationale for scenario-based design, though they are substantively cognitive, do not originate in cognitive science work on problem solving. They largely predate cognitive science, and have developed independently of it. Envisioning and analyzing scenarios of human activity can help understand and create appropriate artifacts to support human activity. Scenario-based design offers significant and unique leverage on some of the most characteristic and vexing challenges of design work. By emphasizing reflection and inquiry as design activities, and by helping to integrate diverse design activities, scenario-based design can also be particularly suitable to motivate and guide design learning. It may be that scenario-based design has attained pre-eminence in the domain of computer systems and software, because software is very malleable as a design material, and yet also very complex. It is particularly easy to create a result in software, and particularly difficult to analyze why it is wrong and how to fix it; it is particularly easy and particularly costly to engage in solution-first design. Scenario-based design ameliorates the problems entrained by solution-first design in such a variety of ways, it can seem like a happy coincidence of a bag of tricks. But, in fact scenario-based design changes the object of design from an artifact or system in the world to a series of actions and experiences in human activity. This is perhaps why the deepest root of scenario-based design is in strategic planning instead of design studies.