Published research on design rationale (DR) goes back at least 25 years. Judging by the number of publications and the variety of application domains, there has been a significant increase in related research activities in recent years. For example, there have been other special issues on design rationale (e.g., Carrol & Moran, 1991), workshops in international conferences (e.g., Lee, 1992; Chung & Bañares–Alcántara, 1994), and the first book on design rationale has just appeared (Carrol & Moran, 1996).

Present-day software applications are increasingly required to be “reuse-conscious” in terms of the operating platforms, topology, and evolutionary requirements. Traditionally, there has been much difficulty in communicating specialized knowledge like design intents, design recommendations, and design justifications in the discipline of software engineering. This paper presents a methodology based on the combination of design rationale and design patterns to design reusable software systems. Design rationale is the representation of the reasoning behind the design of an artifact. Design patterns are descriptions of communicating objects and classes that are customized to solve a general design problem in a particular context. The paper details the use of an explicit software development process to capture and disseminate the specialized knowledge (i.e., intents, recommendations, and justifications) that augments the description of the cases in a library (i.e., design patterns) during the development of software applications by heterogeneous groups. The importance of preserving and using this specialized knowledge has become apparent with the growing trend of combining the software development process with the product (i.e., software code). The importance of codifying corporate memory in this regard is also important considering the changing nature of the workplace, where more people are on contract. The information on how and why a software code was developed becomes essential for efficient and smooth continuity of the present software project as well as for reusing the code in future projects. It has become essential to capture the design rationale to develop and design software systems efficiently and reliably. The software prototype developed using the combined methodology will be used as a part of an integrated design environment for reusable software design. This environment supports collaborative development of software applications by a group of software specialists from a library of building block cases represented by design patterns.

A design is a plan containing guidelines to build and understand an artifact. Generally, this plan is constructed by a team of designers with different tasks, but sharing a common objective, that is, to create a high-quality, low-cost integrated artifact. Active Design Documents (ADDs) are powerful tools for cooperative design because they account for revealing the rationale among design participants while assisting each of them in their own. Design rationale capture and retrieval are critical issues on building documentation assistant tools. In this paper, we propose to achieve more efficient and effective delivery of design and designers intent by resorting to rhetorical means. The wealth of knowledge kept in ADD’s knowledge bases is organized into high-level Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) schema and mapped onto input and output screen configurations that gear the interaction between systems and users. We illustrate the effects of such an organization with evidences from an implemented version of ADD for the domain of offshore platform.

Design support systems need to be developed on the basis of an understanding of the human design process to be useful during design. The explicit representation of design history and rationale are of particular importance for explanation and reuse. Within the DESIRE framework for compositional modelling, a generic task model of design has been developed that clearly specifies the role of design history and design rationale within the design process. The model provides a structure to distinguish different types of design rationale, according to the functional role they play in the design process. It has been used to structure the modelling process of an example aircraft design task, which illustrates the various instances of design rationale that can be generated.

Design rationale is a topic that implies different things to different people. To some it implies argumentation and frameworks for argumentation. To others it implies the documentation of design, like that required for many types of industrial or government work. Still others describe design rationale as the capture and potential reuse of normal communication about design. These perspectives of design rationale use different representations, which influence their ability to capture and to retrieve and use information. We propose an integrated approach to design rationale where design communication is captured and, over time, incrementally structured into argumentation and other formalisms to enable improved retrieval and use of this information. Two systems, PHIDIAS and the Hyper-Object Substrate, are used to demonstrate: (1) how to capture and integrate a variety of design information, (2) how to support the structuring of unstructured information, and (3) how to use design information to actively support design.

During the course of the design of a complex artifact many thousands of objects will be created that will refer to many different types of information. Thus, an effective design support system must be able to store various types of data and allow easy navigation of the resulting extensive network of objects. In addition, the quality of the design records (both the record of the design artifact and rationale) is increased by the quality and quantity of information which the designer is able to record. In this paper we describe two new developments to Kbds a design support system for chemical process design, which enable easier navigation of the design network, and a fuller representation of the design process. In addition, we show how these extensions may be used together to improve the quality of the design information recorded—both for the evolution of the design artifact and the supporting rationale. The first development enables the designer to record a variety of complementary types of document within the process design history, fulfilling the task of improving the design information recorded. The second enhancement to Kbds eases the navigation of the design history by categorizing design objects according to a user-defined set of keywords. The categorization of design objects is carried out semiautomatically using, in part, the various design representations (documents) enabled through the first extension and enables rapid navigation of the design network. Finally, a method of checking the consistency of design rationale structures using keywords is also described. Thus, various representations may be used to generate keywords that in turn may be used to improve the quality of design rationale records. An example showing this situation is described.

The following erratum is to correct an omission of a table during the publication phase of the article entitled: “User interface for specification language for case-based mechanical design” by Abhay Dandekar, Ibrahim Zeid, and Theodore Bardasz (AI EDAM, 11(1), p. 18).

The table referred to reads:

The Editor-In-Chief and Publisher regret the inadvertent mistake.