Analysis of Design Documentation

In design practice a process where a satisfactory solution is created within limited resources is required. However, since the design process is not well understood, research into how engineering designers actually solve design problems is needed. As a contribution to that end a research project has been established where we seek to identify useful design work patterns by retrospective analyses of documentation created during design projects.

This paper describes the analysis method, a tentatively defined metric to evaluate identified work patterns, and presents results from the first analysis accomplished.