A design is a plan containing guidelines to build and understand an artifact. Generally, this plan is constructed by a team of designers with different tasks, but sharing a common objective, that is, to create a high-quality, low-cost integrated artifact. Active Design Documents (ADDs) are powerful tools for cooperative design because they account for revealing the rationale among design participants while assisting each of them in their own. Design rationale capture and retrieval are critical issues on building documentation assistant tools. In this paper, we propose to achieve more efficient and effective delivery of design and designers intent by resorting to rhetorical means. The wealth of knowledge kept in ADD’s knowledge bases is organized into high-level Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) schema and mapped onto input and output screen configurations that gear the interaction between systems and users. We illustrate the effects of such an organization with evidences from an implemented version of ADD for the domain of offshore platform.
