DESIGNING THE PROCESS DESIGN PROCESS

We suggest that designing design processes is an ill-posed problem whi ch must be tackled with great care and in an evolutionary fashion. We argue it is an important activity, however, as companies today use a s mall percentage of the intellectual capital they own when designing, s uggesting there is room for significant improvement. We discuss who in industry and academia are currently involved with designing design pr ocesses. Based on empirical studies we and others have carried out, we have based our approach to study and support design processes on mana ging the information they generate and use. We are learning how to car ry out studies more effectively with industrial partners, what feature s we need for managing information to study and improve design process es. We are even learning some general observations about the effect of different behavior of the group on its success at designing.