DIO: A Pattern for Capturing the Intents Underlying Designs

A critical and often overlooked aspect underlying the design and consequent realisation of an artifact is its design intent. Given the highly distributed and diverse nature of workflows in today’s design environments, the need to have a shared understanding of the design intent, to enable effective communication and coordination between the development teams is crucial. In this paper we present DIO: a generic content ontology design pattern that provides the much required conceptualisation needed to capture the knowledge generated during design phases. We further show, how DIO can be specialised to generate a pattern SDI (Software Design Intent) that enables the capturing of knowledge during Software design phases.