Reusing design process based on cognitive knowledge templates

Reusing existing successful design can reduce time and cost of product development. Unfortunately the traditional design process templates reveal less details about the designer's thinking process to other designers. This paper explores a method of delivering sufficient knowledge to make design process reuse worthwhile by attaching cognitive knowledge such as design intents and justifications to the generic knowledge template. Not only the design procedures but also rationales behind them are included in this template. Standards for the retrieval of the template contents, rules for representation of the template ingredients, formal guidelines for reuse of these templates and procedures for their composition into more complex design process are discussed. The cognitive template is extracted from design thinking process models developed in the authors' previous research. There are three steps for design process reuse based on this template: 1)searching matched or partly matched templates from template base; 2) customizing or composing multiple templates into one more complex template to satisfy the design requirements; 3) instantiating this template referring to design conditions. A design process navigation system is developed for reusing design process based on this cognitive template. An instance of design process reuse is illuminated to validate this system.