DRCS: An Integrated System for Capture of Designs and Their Rationale

In current design practice, the rationale for design decisions is captured, if at all, as a collection of paper documents, project and personal notebook entries as well as designer’s recollections, and is maintained distinctly from the description of the design itself. Increasing demands for higher product quality and lower cost, the growing complexity of the artifacts we design as well as the highly distributed nature of modern manufacturing enterprises is making it increasingly critical that design rationale be captured in a highly usable form, and in particular one that allows us to harness the power of computers to support our activities. Existing rationale capture systems, however, have important limitations: they are either not oriented specifically towards the design process or use a representation not easily generalizable to the full range of potential design problems. This document presents a rationale capture language and system that transcends these limitations by being able to capture designs and their rationale in an integrated way.