Cognitive issues in representing design reasoning as hypertext

Hypertext offers powerful facilities for representing and manipulating structure, but the cognitive task of parsing ideas into discrete chunks can be intrusive. This summary describes ongoing work looking at the use of semi-formal notations for representing design reasoning. One experiment highlighted a number of cognitive overheads in using the notation, but a subsequent study is indicating that with training, the notation can be used unobtrusively by computer scientists to record reasoning during design problem solving.