Author(s)

A.C. Bicharra Garcia & H.C. Howard

Abstract

Active design documents: From information archives to design model construction or making documents useful A.C. Bicharra Garcia & H.C. Howard Department of Civil Engineering, Stanford CV1 ABSTRACT A new approach to design documentation is presented for increasing the quality of documents without increasing the designer's overhead in creating it. The central idea is to create an initial design model able to generate and explain standard design decisions. Instead of recording their decisions, designers adjust the initial design model. The result is no longer a static record of the design, but an active document containing a design model able to generate explanations for a design. We have implemented a software prototype for the active documents approach in the domain of preliminary design of Heating, Ventilation and Air Conditioning systems (HVAC). The prototype test results indicate that the approach is feasible. The results also indicate that active do

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