Exclusively from Cambridge: Design Rationale Editor (DRed)

In recent months, I spent quite a bit of time looking at different modelling software packages for my PhD thesis. I have been particularily interested in the functionality of P3 and DRed, both of which are proprietary software systems of the Engineering Design Centre at the University of Cambridge. More about P3 will be explained in the next post, while today’s post focuses on the Design Rationale Editor (DRed).

DRed is a new IBIS-based software and it has been researched, implemented and introduced into industry by Rob Bracewell. The system is aimed at unobtrusively capturing, graphically presenting, and storing for future reuse, the rationale behind the day to day decisions of individuals or groups of designers. DRed allows designers to record their design rationale (DR) at the time of its generation and deliberation. The design rationale is displayed in a document as a graph of nodes linked with directed arcs. The user creates the nodes by choosing from a predefined set of element types. The key element types are: issue, answer, and argument.

The DRed system has become quite a success story especially among the designers at Rolls-Royce as using it improved the company’s design process. As a result, the system was given the Rolls-Royce Research and Technology Director’s Creativity Award for 2004. Using DRed has been made mandatory for design scheme reviews on at least one Rolls-Royce project. More companies are now interested in the functionality and usefulness of DRed as it evolved into a tool which maps a unified information space covering product planning, specification, design and service. Users can now create bidirectional hyperlinks between DRed elements and selected locations in a range of external document types.