Who is Frederick Brooks?

Summary of the WSOM Design Requirements Workshop - Day 1 Video (0:00 - 12:20)

The video starts out with Mr. Brooks presenting the meaning of design. Mr. Brooks goes on to talk about the "larger context of the whole design process". Mr. Brooks talks about ways to study the design process and why we should study this process. He believes other people can be thought design as well.

Brooks mentions Sir Francis Bacon's Reason asking can we learn from the older designs, so we can get to newer designs faster? 19th century designers' designs were solo designs, however in the 21st century, designers work in a team to build a design. Talks about how engineers should think of design, perhaps using a mono-rooted design tree. He says there should be a goal, desiderata, critical budget, etc. He mentions several examples about software and computer architecture.

Mentions his 187 page design log for the extension of the 4-bedroom design of his home. He has asked a team to create a digital copy of the log and figure out what part of the log are key, and create a design tree. The most important thing is that we do not know what the goal is. We do not know what we are trying to build.

Talks about a project engineer wanted a database which kept track of the chain status of his drawings. The project engineer kept asking Mr. Brooks to change the design of the database. The most useful thing Mr. Brooks was doing for the engineer was helping him decide what he wanted and how he wanted to implement his design.

You cannot separate the design process from the requirements process.

Frederick Brooks

According to wikipedia.com, Mr. Brooks is a software engineer and computer scientist best known for managing IBM's System/360 family of computers and the OS/360 software support package. He later wrote a book called The Mythical Man-Month, in which he wrote about the process. Brooks also founded the Computer Science Department at the University of North Carolina.

In a 2010 interview by Kevin Kelly for an article[2] in Wired Magazine, Brooks was asked "What do you consider your greatest technological achievement?" Brooks responded "The most important single decision I ever made was to change the IBM 360 series from a 6-bit byte to an 8-bit byte, thereby enabling the use of lowercase letters. That change propagated everywhere."

Francis Bacon

According to wikipedia.com, Mr. Bacon was an English philosopher, statesman, scientist, lawyer, jurist, author and pioneer of the scientific method. He served both as Attorney General and Lord Chancellor of England. Although his political career ended in disgrace, he remained extremely influential through his works, especially as philosophical advocate and practitioner of the scientific method during the scientific revolution.

Brunelleschi

According to wikipedia.com, Mr. Brunelleschi was one of the foremost architects and engineers of the Italian Renaissance. He is perhaps most famous for inventing linear perspective and designing the dome of the Florence Cathedral, but his accomplishments also included bronze artwork, architecture (churches and chapels, fortifications, a hospital, etc), mathematics, engineering (hydraulic machinery, clockwork mechanisms, theatrical machinery, etc) and even ship design. His principal surviving works are to be found in Florence, Italy.

Christopher Wren

According to wikipedia.com, Mr. Wren is one of the most highly acclaimed English architects in history. He used to be accorded responsibility for rebuilding 51 churches in the City of London after the Great Fire in 1666, including his masterpiece, St. Paul's Cathedral, on Ludgate Hill, completed in 1710. The principal creative responsibility for a number of the churches is now more commonly attributed to others in his office, especially Nicholas Hawksmoor. Other notable buildings by Wren include the Royal Naval College in Greenwich and the south front of Hampton Court Palace.

Educated in Latin and Aristotelian physics at the University of Oxford, Wren was a notable astronomer, geometer, and mathematician-physicist, as well as an architect. He was a founder of the Royal Society (president 1680–82), and his scientific work was highly regarded by Sir Isaac Newton and Blaise Pascal.

Herbert Simon

According to wikipedia.com, Mr. Simon was an American political scientist, economist, sociologist, and psychologist, and professor at Carnegie Mellon University, whose research ranged across the fields of many different studies. With almost a thousand very highly cited publications, he is one of the most influential social scientists of the 20th century.

Simon was among the founding fathers of several of today's important scientific domains, including artificial intelligence, information processing, decision-making, problem-solving, attention economics, organization theory, complex systems, and computer simulation of scientific discovery. He coined the terms bounded rationality and satisfying, and was the first to analyze the architecture of complexity and to propose a preferential attachment mechanism to explain power law distributions.

He also received many top-level honors later in life. These include: the ACM's Turing Award for making "basic contributions to artificial intelligence, the psychology of human cognition, and several other prestigious awards.

Desiderata

Term used to describe "desired things"