Connecting designing and engineering activities

Abstract

Different design thinking activities result in a multitude of analog as well as digital artifacts. These capture the working results and are employed as a medium to communicate and preserve the embodied design decisions, observations and insights. When engineers or design thinkers want to revisit particular design activities, the information captured by the latest artifacts typically handed over or maintained are not enough. In addition, earlier artifacts, their context, dependencies between artifacts, the design rationale and other related details would be required. However, this information is often hard or impossible to recover if it was not systematically captured and documented. In the first year of our research project we therefore studied how to organize the design artifacts and their dependencies in a cost-effective manner to be able to retrieve information for engineers who have to realize the results. This includes an understanding of the actual challenge concerning documenting during design thinking.