Issues Critical to the Development of Design History, Design Rationale and Design Intent Systems

Design is the evolution of information. This evolution usually begins with an ill-defined need for a product and ends with exact specifications for production, use and retirement or recycling. A number of researchers have hypothesized that capture and reuse of this evolving information has potential for improving the design process and the reuse of design information. Published work has used the terms design history, design rationale, design intent and corporate memory to describe the systems that manage the capture, storage and query of the evolving information. The development of these systems depends on attention to 13 outstanding issues identified in this paper.