A DESIGN DATA MODEL TO SUPPORT RATIONALE CAPTURE AND FUNCTIONAL SYNTHESIS

摘要

Keeping design notebooks is widely considered to be a very good practice as it allows the progression of a design to be recorded, and it is one of the few spontaneous ways in which designers document their design processes. Nevertheless, design notebooks by their nature contain diverse collections of information and knowledge, lacking any clear and comprehensive structure. The aim of researching the generation and use of such design knowledge is to provide a better understanding of how it may be captured and structured for later review and reuse, either by the original designers or by others. In this paper, we explore and test ways of structuring design rationale that is recorded in design notebooks during mechanical design projects. Our investigation focuses on the application of two well-known alternative knowledge structures. These are PROSUS matrices that are used for indexing design rationale against the nodes of a product breakdown [1], and Function-Means Trees [2] that are used to represent the generation and combination of alternative partial design solutions. The results are compared with the Design Data Model, which has been proposed as a way of beneficially unifying these two seemingly incompatible approaches. Design notebooks kept during the Mobile Arm Support project, an in-house design project undertaken between 1992 and 1997 in Cambridge Engineering Design Centre, provided the source material to illustrate our arguments.