Abstract
We describe a design process recording method and a prototype implementation. They are being developed from data on several design projects, including an in-depth study of a 6-month long design effort, itself part of a multi-year aerospace research and design project. The work is also influenced by the larger context of other design research projects at Stanford. The recording method focuses on information generated in early stages of design that is at the same time easiest to capture and most useful to designers and engineers downstream. It does this by being based primarily on a design process model intended to reflect a designer’s point of view, and by taking advantage of practices that designers currently find useful. The method builds on the concept of an electronic notebook that has been described previously (Lakin et al., 1989). The record consists of connected pieces of information about the various concepts, notes, and documents that are central to an evolving design. We call the framework for the record a hypergraph: ‘graph’ because of its node-arc structure, and ‘hyper’ because it spans several types of information that are created during design work. To effectively convey the record’s contents to a downstream user, we propose a design story-teller style: the system’s response to a query takes the form of a storyboard of notes about related design episodes.
