Towards a Rhetoric of Active Design Documents

Design documentation is costly, often inconsistent, and generally incomplete. Active Documents offer an active approach to capturing and delivering design rationale. In ADD, an existing implementation of an active document, what is stored and manipulated by system and user is not just information, but knowledge. Delivering knowledge at the interface level is a complex task, involving communicative strategies that fully explore documentation resources and adequately meet users cognitive needs. The implemented system generates information that can be displayed as an explanation, but it lacks rhetorical organization and structuring. Users, on their own, cannot be expected to (1) explore the full wealth of knowledge resources available in an active document, and (2) diagnose their own misconceptions about the design model and history. This paper discusses the potential for improving the input and output code, as well as for introducing dialogue structure, so that the knowledge usability problem in (1) and the cognitive paradox problem in (2) are made smaller.