Web Database for Design Process Descriptions

Software	(Probably) Java and XHTML, maybe XML, plus a database management system
Covers	Programming, systems design, web interface design, databases
Skills Required	Programming, some knowledge of databases and web publishing, preferably some interest in HCI and in design, coping with the ignorant client from hell.
Challenge	Conceptual ??? Technical ??? Programming ???

Brief Description

Martin Stacey is involved in a research project with colleagues at the University of Cambridge, the Open University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, that is studying the similarities and differences between design processes between companies, between product types and between industries, ranging from airliners to pullovers. One aspect of this research project is the description of patterns of characteristic features of design processes and the causal factors that link them, that can be present in superficially different design processes and absent in others. The research project aims to develop, over time, a large catalogue of such patterns.

The aim of this project is to develop a web database system to hold this catalogue. It should enable the members of the project, anywhere in the world, to write and amend descriptions of these patterns of designing, via the World Wide Web. The system should make it easy to create new entries by modifying old ones, organise entries in the catalogue into hierarchies and then amend those hierarchies, and include cross-references to different kinds of documents within the catalogue. The system should support password protection for edit functions, and perhaps for accessing some pages; it should also enable submissions of proposed changes to be made to a moderator. Ideally it should support rollback to a previous state, and some form of version control.

Warning: these users have requirements....

Variant

This might be the ideal project within which to explore the power of object oriented databases.

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