The different design thinking activities result in numerous analog as well as digital artifacts which capture the working results and are employed as medium to communicate as well as preserve the embodied design decisions, observations or insights. When engineering and also sometimes when revisiting particular design activities the information captured by the artifacts typically handover or maintained is not enough. In addition, former artifacts, their context, dependencies between the artifacts, the design rational and many details that are not available in the artifact itself would be required. However, this information is often hard or impossible to recover.

In this research project we therefore suggest to study how to organize the design artifacts and their dependencies in a cost-effective manner to be able to retrieve information as required for engineering as well as repeated design activities.

• Prof. Dr. Holger Giese
• Thomas Beyhl
• Gregor Gabrysiak
• Andreas Seibel