DesignWebs: Towards the creation of an interactive navigational tool to assist and support engineering design learning

Abstract

For both student and professional design teams, knowledge generated during the design process frequently goes uncaptured, and when it is captured, it is usually poorly organized and buried in obscure documents. The design and development process requires that collaborators build and retain knowledge through discussions, creating documents and sharing artifacts. Effective capture of both semantic knowledge and episodic knowledge can have many benefits for both student and professional design teams. The key to supporting these knowledge building problems is to develop an infrastructure that supports effective knowledge management. In this paper, we describe a framework for DesignWebs, which are dynamic, navigable networks of the documents and conversations created during the design process. A DesignWeb would enable users to see evolving connections between concepts by using a navigable web-based interface that synthesizes the design knowledge from multiple sources of information. © American Society for Engineering Education, 2009.