Science of Design (SoD)

The Science of Design (SoD) Program at NSF solicits proposals for projects that will bring creative, scientific advances to the design of software artifacts and systems. Design is a topic of great interest in many fields; the goal of the SoD Program is to advance design research and education to meet the critical software design challenges of the 21st century. The objective of the program is to bring new paradigms, concepts, approaches, models, and theories into the development of a strong intellectual foundation for software design, which will ultimately improve the processes of constructing, evaluating, and modifying software-intensive systems. This body of knowledge needs to be intellectually rigorous, formalized where appropriate, supported by empirical evidence where possible, open to creative, artistic expression, and above all, teachable.

Future software-intensive systems will be vastly different from those in use today. Revolutionary advances in hardware, networking, and human interface technologies will require entirely new ways of thinking about how software systems are conceptualized, built, understood, and evaluated. As we envision the future of complex distributed computing environments, innovative research is needed to provide the scientific foundations for managing issues of complexity, quality, cost, and human intellectual control of software design and development. To these ends, importing and adapting ideas from other design fields (engineering, biology, architecture, economics, and the arts, for example) are encouraged. Similarly, it is critical that software design researchers work across different areas within computer science to insure that design includes the interdependencies of software with other systems artifacts, such as complex data structures and data repositories. Thus, continuations of current lines of research or research to incrementally extend current software design methods are unlikely to be competitive in this solicitation.

While proposals from individual researchers will be considered by the SoD program, this year the program's focus will be on interdisciplinary team projects. Each proposal should provide a convincing argument that the proposed research is innovative and unique in its contribution to the Science of Design discipline, including careful reference to the literature. Selected projects will be funded for durations and at levels commensurate with the size of the team and the nature of the research. Larger projects typically will be funded for up to 3 years at levels of up to $300,000 per year. Investigators who wish to submit proposals that exceed these parameters must receive prior permission to do so from an SoD program officer.