Learning from Design projects: How to keep track and learn from knowledge produced in daily activity
Résumé
A lot of questions are still discussed: what is knowledge? How knowledge is built? How is it represented in mind? How can it be kept? How can it be learned? Platon, for instance, define the thought as the intellectual model of objects. Heraclite went towards the definition of the logos as a triangle in which distinguished thought, from expression, from reality. Currently these representations are more and more used to enhance learning from expertise and past experience. Based on this theory, knowledge engineering approaches provide techniques that help to represent expertise as references at semantic level and enhance learning from these references. We study how to capture and represent knowledge produced in design daily activities. So we develop techniques, firstly to capture information produced in design projects and secondly to classify traces in order to develop semantic concepts and enhance learning in an organization. The application of this approach in two examples is presented in this paper. 1 Introduction Design is a collaborative activity, in which several actors with different skills and backgrounds work together to reach a given goal. Design project team is a short-lived organization ; at the end of a project actors are engaged in other projects with other organizations. Moreover, several companies can do projects; actors can belong to different countries (i.e. in big companies). Given these types of organizations, the goal for knowledge management is how to learn from past design projects to help to solve new design problems. Representing this type of knowledge leads to represent also its context and especially, the organization and the environment in which it is produced. "The learning content is context specific, and it implies discovery of what is to be done when and how according to the specific organizations routines"[9]. We present in this paper, an example on keeping track of design daily information and classifying it in order to enhance learning from past projects. 2 Capturing and representing daily knowledge The challenge to manage daily knowledge is to deal with: