The proposition that people rely on mental models was first put forward by the Scottish psychologist Kenneth Craik in 1943. In his book The Nature of Exploration (Craik 1943), he wrote that the mind constructs "small-scale models" of reality that it uses to reason, to anticipate events and to underlie explanation.

Crystallised from my theoretical framework, I attempt to further a view of computer science as ‘computing science’, a discipline with an accentuation of how computing is put to use as opposed to technical rationality.