Integrating the codification and personalisation views of knowledge for collaborative design

Collaborative design entails sharing knowledge in an effective way and from a variety of sources, which raises the need of developing technology-enabled systems that can improve decision making by streamlining complex analysis and synthesis processes and facilitating communication and negotiation in the design process. While previous research predominantly focuses on a particular aspect of design knowledge, an integrated method is required to develop such systems especially in the context that the amount of data has become huge. To address such a gap, this work aims to address the two views of design knowledge, namely codification and personalisation. The main idea is to facilitate the collaborative design process with a model-based solution which uses computational methods based on codified knowledge while incorporating rich personal experience of problem-solving for decision-making. This solution requires an effective knowledge representation that facilitates the integration of explicit and tacit knowledge in the computational processes. In addition, it relies on effective system integration during these processes. This paper reports the very first step towards such a solution, describing the system integration issues and the user interaction issues in the development of a prototype system.