Improving design and documentation by using partially automated synthesis

One of the products of engineering, besides constructed artifacts, is design documentation. To understand how design participants use documentation, we interviewed designers and typical documentation users and also took protocols of them both creating and using design documentation. Our protocols were taken from realistic projects of preliminary design for heating, ventilation and air conditioning systems (HVAC). Our studies of document creation and use revealed three important issues: (1) Design participants not only look up design facts; they frequently access documents to obtain information about the rationale for design decisions; (2) The design rationale that they seek is often missing from the documents; (3) design requirements change frequently over a project life cycle so that design documents are often inconsistent and out-of-date. Recognizing these documentation issues in design practice, we developed a new approach in which documents are no longer static records, but rather interactive design models supporting a case. We demonstrated the feasibility of the approach by constructing a running system and testing it designers on realistic problems. We also analyze the costs and benefits of creating and using documentation of design rationale and of the active documents approach in particular for routine, preliminary design in domains where community practice is widely shared and largely standardized. The approach depends on the feasibility of creating a parametric design model for the design domain.