Shared Viewpoint Design Techniques in the Age of AI
Article by Paul Preiss (Founder and CEO of IASA Global)
I remember the first time I watched two senior architects argue for two hours about a system design and realize at the end they had been describing the same thing in different languages.
Neither was wrong. They just had no shared vocabulary for the problem. No common lens. And two hours of good thinking evaporated into confusion.
Design is a thinking activity. It is how architects process a problem, explore options, surface the constraints that matter, and make decisions at the right moment. When two architects share a design language, that thinking gets fast. Brutally fast. One says "what does the deployment view tell us here" and the other already knows exactly what that means, what questions it answers, what it leaves out. They can challenge each other precisely and move.
When they don't share that language, every conversation starts from scratch.
This is what viewpoints actually solve. A viewpoint is a shared lens for design thinking. A way of looking at a system from a particular angle, with a particular set of concerns in mind, aimed at particular people. Kruchten built his 4+1 model around this idea in the 1990s. ISO 42010 codified it. Rozanski and Woods, SEI's Views and Beyond, C4, Archimate, all of them are attempts at building shared design languages for architects to think with.
And here is where we have a real problem.
A software architect trained on C4 and a solution architect trained on Archimate are using different lenses on the same system. They may both be doing good design thinking. They just cannot share it cleanly. They cannot hand off. They cannot review each other's work at speed. The shared language breaks down between them and the design conversation slows to a crawl or stops.
That matters a lot right now. Because AI development has changed the pace of everything.
Read also: Designing AI with Purpose
AI coding tools are generating systems faster than most architecture practices can think about them. An agentic pipeline can go from prompt to deployed service in hours. The pressure on architects to make good design decisions fast, and to do it in ways that others can understand and build on, has never been higher. And the nature of the problems has changed too. Safety in AI systems means something different than safety in embedded hardware. Sustainability is now a real architectural concern with real measurement standards. Explainability is a stakeholder concern that most existing viewpoint frameworks were never designed to address.
I have watched architecture practices fail at exactly this moment. The design thinking is there individually. The shared language to make it collective and fast is missing.
We are building that language.
At Iasa, we are producing the BTABoK viewpoint library. A complete set of system design viewpoints grounded in current standards, ISO/IEC 25010:2023, IEC 61508, ISO 26262, ISO 21031, covering performance, reliability, security, usability, maintainability, safety, and sustainability. Each viewpoint includes worked examples, explicit concern mappings, and connection to architecture decisions. The goal is a library that any architect can pick up, orient to a problem, and use to think and communicate clearly with other architects who know the same library.
And alongside it, we are building a training program that brings together the learning from every major modern approach.
Kruchten. Rozanski and Woods. Views and Beyond from SEI. C4. Domain-driven design context mapping. AI-specific design lenses that no existing framework has standardized yet. Architects need all of these. Knowing which lens to reach for, when, and why is a genuine professional skill. We are teaching it at every CITA level from Foundation through Distinguished.
AI development needs this more urgently than anything we have built before. When your systems are being assembled at machine speed, the thinking that shapes them has to be sharp, shared, and fast. Shared viewpoints are how a practice achieves that.
The library is being built openly in the BTABoK at education.iasaglobal.org. The training is in development now. If you want to be part of it early, or if you have strong opinions about what belongs in a professional viewpoint library, reach out or drop a comment.
This is for the profession. That includes you.
Read also: Realistic AI: Beyond the Hype Cycle
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The AI era is also pushing architects to adapt and develop the right skill sets to effectively support business transformation. If you're looking for the right place to build those capabilities, ATD Solution is here to help.
Explore the full information through this link: https://atdsolution.com/event/.
Source: Article by Paul Preiss (Founder and CEO of IASA Global) on LinkedIn Newsletter.
I remember the first time I watched two senior architects argue for two hours about a system design and realize at the end they had been describing the same thing in different languages.
Neither was wrong. They just had no shared vocabulary for the problem. No common lens. And two hours of good thinking evaporated into confusion.
Design is a thinking activity. It is how architects process a problem, explore options, surface the constraints that matter, and make decisions at the right moment. When two architects share a design language, that thinking gets fast. Brutally fast. One says "what does the deployment view tell us here" and the other already knows exactly what that means, what questions it answers, what it leaves out. They can challenge each other precisely and move.
When they don't share that language, every conversation starts from scratch.
This is what viewpoints actually solve. A viewpoint is a shared lens for design thinking. A way of looking at a system from a particular angle, with a particular set of concerns in mind, aimed at particular people. Kruchten built his 4+1 model around this idea in the 1990s. ISO 42010 codified it. Rozanski and Woods, SEI's Views and Beyond, C4, Archimate, all of them are attempts at building shared design languages for architects to think with.
And here is where we have a real problem.
A software architect trained on C4 and a solution architect trained on Archimate are using different lenses on the same system. They may both be doing good design thinking. They just cannot share it cleanly. They cannot hand off. They cannot review each other's work at speed. The shared language breaks down between them and the design conversation slows to a crawl or stops.
That matters a lot right now. Because AI development has changed the pace of everything.
Read also: Designing AI with Purpose
AI coding tools are generating systems faster than most architecture practices can think about them. An agentic pipeline can go from prompt to deployed service in hours. The pressure on architects to make good design decisions fast, and to do it in ways that others can understand and build on, has never been higher. And the nature of the problems has changed too. Safety in AI systems means something different than safety in embedded hardware. Sustainability is now a real architectural concern with real measurement standards. Explainability is a stakeholder concern that most existing viewpoint frameworks were never designed to address.
I have watched architecture practices fail at exactly this moment. The design thinking is there individually. The shared language to make it collective and fast is missing.
We are building that language.
At Iasa, we are producing the BTABoK viewpoint library. A complete set of system design viewpoints grounded in current standards, ISO/IEC 25010:2023, IEC 61508, ISO 26262, ISO 21031, covering performance, reliability, security, usability, maintainability, safety, and sustainability. Each viewpoint includes worked examples, explicit concern mappings, and connection to architecture decisions. The goal is a library that any architect can pick up, orient to a problem, and use to think and communicate clearly with other architects who know the same library.
And alongside it, we are building a training program that brings together the learning from every major modern approach.
Kruchten. Rozanski and Woods. Views and Beyond from SEI. C4. Domain-driven design context mapping. AI-specific design lenses that no existing framework has standardized yet. Architects need all of these. Knowing which lens to reach for, when, and why is a genuine professional skill. We are teaching it at every CITA level from Foundation through Distinguished.
AI development needs this more urgently than anything we have built before. When your systems are being assembled at machine speed, the thinking that shapes them has to be sharp, shared, and fast. Shared viewpoints are how a practice achieves that.
The library is being built openly in the BTABoK at education.iasaglobal.org. The training is in development now. If you want to be part of it early, or if you have strong opinions about what belongs in a professional viewpoint library, reach out or drop a comment.
This is for the profession. That includes you.
Read also: Realistic AI: Beyond the Hype Cycle
—----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The AI era is also pushing architects to adapt and develop the right skill sets to effectively support business transformation. If you're looking for the right place to build those capabilities, ATD Solution is here to help.
Explore the full information through this link: https://atdsolution.com/event/.
Source: Article by Paul Preiss (Founder and CEO of IASA Global) on LinkedIn Newsletter.