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© 2010 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
Chapter 18
The Craft of Design
Conversation
Alan F. Blackwell
University of Cambridge
18.1 INTRODUCTION
Soware design is a representational cra. By “representational,” I mean that the purpose of
soware designs is communicative—soware designs are information structures encoded
in representational form, to be read by authors, collaborators, users, and machines. is
much is uncontroversial. e word “cra,” however, is less oen used in respect of soware
design. On the contrary, it has frequently been suggested that cras constitute primitive
modes of professional practice, to be superseded by the planned, ma ...