Tag: formal methods

Jun Hu, Philip Ross, Loe Feijs and Yuechen Qian

Abstract. When designing product behavior, the designer often needs to communicate to experts in computer software and protocols. In present-day software engineering, formal specification methods such as the Universal Modeling Language have been widely accepted. Teaching design students these formal methods is non-trivial because most of design students often have difficulties in programming the behaviors of complex produces and systems. Instead of programming, this paper presents a technique, namely “acting-out”, for design students to master the formal methods. The experience shows that acting-out not only worked out very well as a teaching technique, but also showed the potential for bridging the processes of industrial design and software engineering.