DESIGN RELEVANCE IN AN INDUSTRIAL DESIGN ENGINEERING WIKI

WikID, an Industrial Design Engineering (IDE) wiki, is an online initiative targeted at designers to facilitate the finding of relevant information on the World Wide Web. Because the users of this website have the freedom to author and edit articles, it is necessary to reach consensus on which information is relevant to industrial design engineers. Therefore we have investigated 'design relevance' in literature and have conducted field research containing interviews with experts. As a secondary objective we wish to provide article-writing guidelines for users that help them to decide on design relevance and simultaneously lower the existing technical barrier towards writing and editing articles. Outcomes from the literature study are descriptions of the scope of IDE in terms of products, used disciplines and design aspects. These results were used to create a mission for WikID. We conclude that design relevance is not a property of information, but the situation where user expectations are met. The data that was gathered from the interviews showed commonalities between articles in the same category but not between every article. Therefore each category benefits from its own article-writing guidelines. These were applied on the website as 'forms' in order to validate the results.