The problem with design reuse: An investigation into outcomes and antecedents

An exploratory study of the difficulties of design reuse has been conducted in two design organisations. The study involved building simple causal networks to explain each of 171 cases of problematic reuse described in unstructured interviews with 50 designers and design managers. Most reuse problems concerned transfer that was inhibited in some way, although error and unexpected effort in the reuse process was also a significant outcome. Many of the causes lying behind these problems were local (such as unprecedented client requirements). But many were more general and structural. For instance, reuse was often precluded by differences in preference among designers, or among clients, and these differences appeared to arise from reinforcing feedback effects, which in turn arose from limitations of human inference-like insensitivity to sampling variability and confirmation bias. Reuse was also precluded by engineering problems, such as the combinatorial properties of constraints, which meant, in some instances, component designs could almost never be transferred between applications without extensive modification. In almost all cases, reuse was made problematic by a combination of factors ranging across several categories. Designers' motivations to innovate, for instance, only inhibited reuse because the environment they worked in led them to expect that existing designs would be deficient, and because they had different preferences from the original designer.