AbstractsEngineering

In this knowledge economy, organizations are leveraging their competence through the knowledge they possess. Managing knowledge will potentially retain the competence held by the organization if knowledge generated across its projects and units is captured, structured and reused. Even though many tools and techniques are proposed in the literature to support these activities, their adoption in industry has been meagre. This may be due to development of tools without basing them on substantial and careful descriptive studies. This raises the following research issues: the knowledge processes and knowledge sources available in organizations and their characteristics need to be understood better. To address these gaps, following objectives are addressed in this research: ♦ To understand the specific needs and capability of the organization for capture and reuse of product development knowledge and ♦ To evaluate various alternative supports for capture and structure of relevant, evolving product development knowledge for reuse. To address these objectives, two observational studies were conducted in the organizations. To get a broader picture about the knowledge processes occurring in the organization, a KRIT model is proposed which is an acronym for Knowledge of solutions-Requirements-Interactions-Tasks, in which interactions of the designers with people and tools play the central role in processing knowledge during design. The KRIT model is validated through the demonstration of the existence of its nodes and links. From the observations it has been found that interactions ‘designer working with computer’, ‘two designers working with a computer’ and ‘two designers interacting with each other’ are most frequently occurred, and occupied most of the time during designing. Any tools to support knowledge capture and reuse should support these interactions such that capture and reuse can be intuitive and in-built in a natural way into a designer’s work habits. It is emphasized that there is a substantial need to increase the percentage of time spent by designers on capturing knowledge during the design process. This increase in time would lead to decrease in a designers’ time spent on knowledge acquisition and dissemination provided designers are capturing reusable knowledge. To answer capture and reuse of knowledge in detail in the observational studies, a new taxonomy of knowledge is proposed. By linking the representations of argumentation, designer’s activities, and the artefact being designed, we argued that the expressiveness of this taxonomy is high compared to the others proposed in the literature. The taxonomy has three broad categories of knowledge: topics, classes, and activities. Based on the definitions of the factors used in the taxonomy and the analysis of the protocols, the factors in each group under each category are argued to be mutually exclusive. In order to study the links between the proposed categories and factors in the taxonomy of knowledge, a method for converting the questions and…