Augmenting a Design Capture and Reuse System Based on Direct Observations of Usage
Tao Liang, David M. Cannon, LARRY J. LEIFER · 1998
Abstract In this paper, we describe recent experimental results from an ongoing design knowledge capture and reuse project. In the past several years, an increasing amount of the design work in the ME210 design course at Stanford, in which teams work for 30 weeks on industrially-sponsored real-world projects, has been captured in electronic format. This design information consists of design notes, drawings, reports, slide presentations, emails, vendor references, and even, in some cases, summaries of phone conversations, meeting minutes, and the like. The large corpus of captured information from the period of 1994 to 1996 was made available to the teams working on projects during the 1996–1997 academic year. A variety of filing and indexing schemes were used to organize the past data and help the teams sift through it. Because the data was all made available over a web server, we were able to collect information on access to it. We have thus had a chance to learn from studying the usage of a large body of captured design knowledge. Results from our analysis suggest that there were significant under-utilization of design work of others: there was only 8% access to past works, vs. 92% to the current year’s; and, there was only 15% access to design project-specific information, vs. 85% on logistic resources information. Important lessons have guided our efforts to improve the effectiveness of that usage based on what we’ve learned. These lessons include: • Informal design information is more useful to a broader audience when it is contextualized. We have put in place a capture system that makes it possible for students to add context to any information that’s been captured, and also specific reward structure, encouraging engineers to store, contextualize, and reuse captured design information. Preliminary observations suggest that this is worth the investment for a project as a whole. • It is important to accommodate a heterogeneous computing environment, both for capture and reuse; to support multiple methods for finding information; and to provide a uniform, well-behaved way of displaying archived documents. • In explaining our observations of varying levels of success in design capture systems, we have identified some patterns of enquiry and retrieval usage that are analogous to the patterns seen in library usage. Thus we identify library science as a valuable source of knowledge that until now has been under used by the design community.