The N-dim Approach to Creating Design Support Systems

Creating practical design support systems is a complex design endeavor. We approach it with an evolutionary process, one that studies the design information flow then builds and tests information management support systems. Through our experience with industrial partners we have evolved this process into a set of methods and tools that support these methods. We have evolved an infrastructure called n-dim, that is composed of a small number of building blocks that can be composed in ways that match the complexity of design contexts and work. We have developed this infrastructure to be highly flexible so as to allow us to conduct this evolutionary process in a practical project setting.