Comem: Design Knowledge Reuse from a Corporate Memory: How to Find and Understand Designs from Previous Design Projects in a Corporate Repository

How can a designer find and understand useful content from previous projects in a corporate repository? Ethnographic observations show that a design reuse system must give an overview to enable users to find reusable designs and must provide tools which allow users to explore the context of those designs. A tool is presented called CoMem which draws ideas from the fields of human-computer interaction, information retrieval and information visualization. CoMem is evaluated using formal user testing and the evaluation results show that CoMem offers greater support for finding and understanding than traditional tools, and reuse using CoMem is consistently rated to be more effective by test participants. This supports the hypothesis that finding and understanding lead to more effective reuse. This research makes important contributions by formalizing the reuse process, developing an innovative tool to support that process, and building a framework to study and assess such tools.