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 communicate as well as preserve the embodied design decisions, observations or insights. When engineering and also sometimes when revisiting particular design activities the information captured by the artifacts typically handover or maintained is not enough. In addition, former artifacts, their context, dependencies between the artifacts, the design rational and many details that are not available in the artifact itself would be required. However, this information is often hard or impossible to recover.
Connecting Designing and Engineering Activities I (2011/12)
In this research project we therefore suggest to study how to organize the design artifacts and their dependencies in a cost-effective manner to be able to retrieve information as required for engineering as well as repeated design activities.
Connecting Designing and Engineering Activities II (2012/13)
Providing a Designer's Diary
In this follow-up research project we suggest to study how to map traceability needs to documentation effort to overcome the described loss of information. Together with D-LABS and D-School Potsdam we plan to investigate how an appropriate documentation platform should look like based on insights we got during the first year project concerning the relevant artifacts, dependencies and needs of involved stakeholders.
Connecting Designing and Engineering Activities III (2013/14)
Reconstructing the Design Thinker's Journey
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.
