Conceptual Change in System Understanding: Towards Creative Software Design

摘要

This paper views conceptual change as an element of creative software design. It argues that the process of changing conceptualizations is socially constructed and emphasizes the social origins of knowledge. In support of this view, results from psychology and artificial intelligence are presented. The psychological studies consider conceptualizations as mental representations that describe partial knowledge of a task domain (task conceptualization) as well as knowledge about other participants (social conceptualization). The findings indicate some limitations of conceptual change in collaborative settings and how to overcome these by externalizing models of the social context. Based on these studies a computational model has been implemented that simulates the limitations as well as a method of externalizing social models. The results suggest that the constraints imposed on conceptual change are caused by the process of social concept construction and the relaxation of these constraints are facilitated by extemalization of social models.