Design reuse and design research - Keynote paper

During the process of design, knowledge about the design artifact is accumulated gradually. Designers organize and reuse this knowledge as designs and design processes are continually refined. An understanding of the nature and growth of design knowledge and its reuse is essential for implementing better design systems and more effective design practices. Representing, capturing, organizing and retrieving this design knowledge are all current issues for research in design reuse. When retrieving a prior design, a designer may retrieve by function, behavior, form, or even context; and yet we have no formal representations for most of these attributes. Even with form, for which we have well-developed geometric representations, we still do not have fast or efficient methods for retrieving prior designs with particular features. This paper presents an evolution of ideas over three PhD theses (1, 2, 3) that have studied the structure and representation of design knowledge and implicitly studied design reuse.