PI: Prof. Dr. Holger Giese

Abstract

The different design thinking activities result in numerous analog as well as digital artifacts which capture the working results and are employed as medium to capture not only the final results but also all iterative steps in between. When design thinkers revisit particular design activities or engineers build the proposed idea the information captured by the artifacts typically handed over or maintained is not enough. In addition, former artifacts, their context, dependencies between the artifacts, the design rational and aspects that are not externalized in the artifact itself would be required. This information is often hard or impossible to recover.

In this follow-up research project we investigate how to employ concrete traceability techniques for the documentation of design thinking projects. We are going to deploy our documentation platform, which was developed in the current project year, at D-School Potsdam to collect real documentation data. Additionally, we plan to employ the same traceability techniques to inventory documentation data provided by D-School Potsdam. With the help of the computed traceability information, we expect to provide answers to the most commonly arising questions of engineers and design thinkers alike. Further, through several experiments we plan to evaluate our results concerning completeness and correctness of the computed traceability information.