Design It!

Adopt a Design Mindset

Designing a software system requires us to think about the architecture from the perspective of different design mindsets. A design mindset is a way of thinking about the world so that we focus our attention on the right details at the right time.

There are four design mindsets: understand, explore, make, and evaluate. Each design mindset comes with a set of practices. To design the architecture, we’ll choose a mindset, pick a practice in that mindset, apply the practice to learn something new about the architecture, and repeat.

The chapters in Part II will show you how to put each mindset into practice. Look for the icon, shown in the image, at the start of each chapter to tell you what the focus will be. For now, let’s ...