Active design documents

Abstract

Technical documents are created, modified and used during the life cycle of an artifact. They can be more or less formal, ranging from normative knowledge-based representations to natural language. They are also tools that support dialogue between designers, manufacturers, trainers, legislators and users. Active design documents (ADDs) are a new generation of support for cooperative work of design teams. ADDs include interaction descriptions (Ids) that provide the way the artifact should be used, interface objects (IOs) that provide an interactive prototype of the artifact, and contextual links (CLs) that enable the storage of evaluations and explanations of the distance between IDs and IOs. Incremental ADD design and evaluation contribute to instantiate a participatory design process and a formal trace of the design rationale as a function of usability criteria. An application in the aeronautics domain is presented.