Documenting argumentation (i.e., design rationale) has great potential for serving design. Despite this potential benefit, our analysis of Horst Rittel's and Donald Schon's design theories and of our own experience has shown that there are the following fundamental obstacles to the effective documentation and use of design rationale: (a) A rationale representation scheme must be found that organizes information according to its relevance to the task at hand; (b) computer support is needed to reduce the burden of recording and using rationale; (c) argumentative and constructive design activities must be linked explicitly by integrated design environments; (d) design rationale must be reusable. In this article, we present the evolution of our conceptual frameworks and systems toward integrated design environments; describe a prototype of an integrated design environment, including its underlying architecture; and discuss some current and future work on extending it.
Design rationale is a topic that implies different things to different people. To some it implies argumentation and frameworks for argumentation. To others it implies the documentation of design, like that required for many types of industrial or government work. Still others describe design rationale as the capture and potential reuse of normal communication about design. These perspectives of design rationale use different representations, which influence their ability to capture and to retrieve and use information. We propose an integrated approach to design rationale where design communication is captured and, over time, incrementally structured into argumentation and other formalisms to enable improved retrieval and use of this information. Two systems, PHIDIAS and the Hyper-Object Substrate, are used to demonstrate: (1) how to capture and integrate a variety of design information, (2) how to support the structuring of unstructured information, and (3) how to use design information to actively support design.
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