Engineering design notebook for sharing and reuse
Jack J Hong, George Toye, LARRY J. LEIFER · Computers in Industry · 1996
The concept of an electronic or digital engineering design notebook used by designers to capture information for reuse and sharing is becoming reality in many different flavors. Our development of pens (Personal Electronic Notebook with Sharing) responds to observed designers' needs for a lightweight tool that is facile enough to compete with paper notebooks in functionality. Each time informal design notes are entered in pens, a project information web automatically grows. As it grows, selections can be incrementally shared with collaborators over the Internet's World-Wide Web (WWW). In an era where both network security concerns and distributed collaboration demands are growing together, pens has the capability for information sharing that is independent of security firewalls. To evaluate the utility of the pens notebook concept, a prototype was developed and used by 14 mechanical engineering design teams, many of which were composed of geographically distributed team members.