We are developing a graduate curriculum and summer school on design research intended to prepare graduate students to do research about the nature of design or research about a class of designs, including concepts, models, and methods for that class. We expect our summer school to advance the science of design of software-intensive systems by fostering an open community of design researchers, both in software design and in related disciplines, who are knowledgeable about design and design research methods and who are interested in advancing the field. The curriculum will create a common basis for discussion and identify core material to master, while the flexible format of the workshop will encourage the introduction of new ideas and new methods.

The goals of our course and summer school are to (1) develop an open community of graduate students, faculty, and industry researchers who are actively engaged in the advancement of software design research and (2) to associate this community with the larger community of researchers from related areas of design research who can contribute to the software design community and who can take ideas from software design back to their own research communities. We will offer a week-long summer school in May-June 2007, in which PhD students, who are just beginning to develop their research proposals, will have the opportunity to work closely with faculty and researchers who are on the forefront of software design research and related design fields.