Product modelling and rationale capture in design process

Product design is an intuitive activity and generates a lot of information supporting the product in the rest of its life cycle. These information consist of both foreground (explicitly recorded) and background (normally unconsciously referred in practice) information. This paper describes a system developed based on the hierarchical structure of product modelling methodology for capturing an important part of the un-written information, design rationale. Developed in a Java environment, the system is platform independent and is designed to be extensible into a global design support system via the internet.