Design rationale

As initially developed by W.R. Kunz and Horst Rittel, design rationale seeks to provide argumentation-based structure to the political, collaborative process of addressing wicked problems.

[6] For supporting design rationale, various frameworks have been proposed, such as QOC, DRCS, IBIS, and DRL.

However, due to the strict format of rationale defined by formal representations, the contents can hardly be understood by human being and the process of capturing design rationale will require more efforts to finish, and therefore becomes more intrusive.

On the other hand, the procedure and method used to capture information of design rationale should not be very intrusive.

In the system with a semiformal representation, the information expected is suggested and the users can capture rationale by following the instructions to either fill out the attributes according to some templates or just type into natural language descriptions.

[32] In civil engineering, it helps to coordinate the variety of work that the designers do at the same time in different areas of a construction project.

Also, the project team members who missed a design meeting can refer back the DR to learn what was discussed on a particular topic.

[5] In some cases DR could save time and money when a software system is upgraded from its previous versions.