Identification of Design Work Patterns by Retrospective Analysis of Work Sheets

In design practice a process where a satisfactory solution is created within limited resources and time is required. However, since the design process is not well understood, research into how engineering designers actually solve design problems is needed. As a contribution to that end a research project is carried out where we seek to identify design work patterns by retrospective analysis of documentation created during design projects.An elements to satisfy the wish for an efficient design process could be to identify work patterns applied by engineering designers, evaluate these patterns with respect to their efficiency, and reuse the most efficient in future projects. Thus, the objective of this research is to analyse design projects in order to identify the work patterns applied. Based on an evaluation of identified work patterns we expect a recommendation of work patterns supporting an efficient design process can be established.In this paper we describe the analysis method, and present observations from analyses of three projects.