Modeled on the Delft Protocol Workshop of 1994, the Studying Professional Software Design (SPSD) Workshop at Irvine asked researchers to examine the SPSD design protocols using a specific method of analysis or perspective. The chapters that result from the workshop remind me of the tale of the blind men and the elephant—one feels the leg and says an elephant is like a pillar; another feels the trunk and says an elephant is like a rope, and so on. Some authors showcase the felicities of their method or their theoretical framework. Others argue, on the basis of their analysis, for their design support tool. In short, like all the authors in this book, the authors in this section ride their hobbyhorses.

2013 The Blind Men and the Elephant, or the Race of the Hobbyhorses, M Gross, in Software Designers in Action: A Human-Centric Look at Design Work, Petre M and van der Hoek, A, Chapman and Hall/CRC 2013 (219-224). [pdf]
2003 How is a piece of software like a building? Toward general design theory and methods. Position paper for National Science Foundation workshop on Science of Design: Software Intensive Systems, Virginia, Nov 2-4. [pdf]
2003 Design of Software and Software for Design, M. Gross and Y. Yamamoto, Journal of the Human Interface Society (in Japanese)