Knowledge Intensive Design System – an Attempt for Better Engineering Environment

Knowledge Management (KM) is an important issue in engineering. Enterprises engaged in knowledge-intensive work are facing challenges concerning to which extent the emerging collaboratively produced knowledge and tacit knowledge is identified, externalized, explicated, and productively utilized. Knowledge can be classified into explicit and tacit knowledge but also considered as social and cultural activity supported by technological facilities. An engineer surpasses his capabilities using both physical artifacts and support of social network. Knowledge building cannot be separated from social and technological infrastructures it is created / used in. Our approach makes a distinction between idea of KM and Information Management, which deals with the problemacy of capture-codify-store-use of information. Reasoning and problem solving in engineering can be divided into three types: deduction, induction and abduction. Knowledge intensive design system – should support especially abductive reasoning, i.e., decision making based on indefinite and controversive data and hints. In this research we studied how knowledge is built up in social engineering environment and reflected to the product development systems. There were three knowledge work situations: unofficial co-located discussions, product development meetings and independent engineering. In this paper we present an insight of knowledge capturing in those situations.