A designer support environment for cooperative design

The designer proceeds with his work by collecting and combining knowledge about the design object; in so doing, the knowledge possessed by the designer is organized and extended. In cooperative design performed by multiple persons, this organized knowledge is shared among them. This study proposes a designer support environment in which design knowledge is organized by using conceptual systems (ontologies) in the special fields related to the design object. The proposed environment includes workspaces to store individual knowledge and software agents that perform knowledge organization procedures within their own workspaces or across different workspaces, thus supporting the collection, organization, and processing of design knowledge, as well as cooperative design. In addition, the prototype Designers Amplifier system is described, and experimental results obtained with the prototype system in the case of a bicycle rack design are presented. © 1999 Scripta Technica, Syst Comp Jpn, 30(8): 32–39, 1999