Interactive Design Navigational Tools

For both student and professional design teams, the design and development process requires that collaborators build and retain knowledge through discussions, creating documents and sharing artifacts. Key to supporting these knowledge building activities is the development of an infrastructure that supports effective knowledge management. This paper presents the framework for an information management technology called DesignWebs, which assimilates the product structures from the evolving set of documents and discussions about an engineering artifact. A DesignWeb enables users to see evolving connections between concepts by using a navigable web-based interface that synthesizes the design knowledge from multiple sources of information.