Alternatives are also open, in organizing the design process, as to how far development of possible subsystems will be carried before the over-all coordinating design is developed in detail, or vice-versa, how far the over-all design should be carried before various components, or possible components, are developed.

but there is reason to believe that human learning of most kinds can be explained within the framework of the symbol-processing system we have been describing.

In a couple of domains where the matter has been studied, we do know that even the most talented people require approximately a decade to reach top professional proficiency.

The real design problem is not to provide more information to people but to allocate the time they have available for receiving information so that they will get only the information that is most important and relevant to the decisions they will make.

A design representation suitable to a world in which the scarce factor is information may be exactly the wrong one for a world in which the scarce factor is attention.

But the remarkable fact was that, when masters and grandmasters were shown other chessboards with the same numbers of pieces arranged at random. their abilities to reconstruct the boards were only marginally better than the duffers’ with the boards from actual games, while the duffers performed as well or poorly as they had before.

Engineering, medicine, business, architecture, and painting are concerned not with the necessary but with the contingent—not with how things are but with how they might be—in short, with design. The possibility of creating a science or sciences of design is exactly as great as the possibility of creating any science of the artificial. The two

We might be more optimistic if we recognized that we do not have to solve all of these problems. Our essential task—a big enough one to be sure—is simply to keep open the options for the future or perhaps even to broaden them a bit by creating new variety and new niches.

The organism must develop correlations between goals in the sensed world and actions in the world of process. When they are made conscious and verbalized, these correlations correspond to what we usually call means-ends analysis.