Connecting Designing and Engineering Activities III

Nowadays, companies implement innovation processes or outsource them to external consulting companies to gain a competitive business advantage. The methodology of Design Thinking is one example for such an innovation process that enables the creation of innovative products or services, which make sense to people and for people, are likely to become a sustainable business model as well as are functionally possible in the foreseeable future. But, innovators and engineers are seldom the same people, what makes documenting innovation projects with a subsequent information handover inevitable. In practice, this information handover seldom goes smoothly due to missing, incomplete, or not traceable documentation of innovation projects. The situation becomes even worse when important design rationales, design paths and design alternatives are not retrievable anymore, because the missing information may lead to a realization of the innovation that was not intended by the innovators. The retrieval of design paths, design rationales, and design alternatives requires high manual effort, if at all possible. In this chapter, we present a recovery approach that eases the retrieval of design artifacts by recovering design paths before the actual retrieval happens. For that purpose, our recovery approach employs recovery modules that implement knowledge extraction procedures and recovery algorithms. We evaluate our recovery approach using inventory documentation collected in educational Design Thinking settings.