Poster

Pet (Project Evolution Tracking) Cemetery - Capturing, tracking, storing and retrieving design decisions

Susan Webber

In the lifecycle of a project we come up with many design ideas, some of which we run with, and others which we discard. In the design industry all kinds of schemes and notions get their shot at realisation but not all are destined for success. Technical impediments, client preferences, budgetary constraints and a host of other factors mean that in the commercial world lots of ideas must be rejected for reasons that later reviewers or new members of the team find difficult to rationalise. Any project in reality boils down to a series of decisions but a decision that makes sense in November can seem poorly thought through or just wrong by March, especially when the problem is viewed by newcomers with a new perspective on things or the criteria on which the decision was made has become obscure. Should an idea live or die? Nobody really knows for sure. What we should be able to know is why the decision was made at the time and what were the factors informing the evaluation. Designers need to be open to revisiting ideas and revising with an open mind. What we are proposing is a method to ensure that costly and future repetition of effort can be avoided while facilitating ongoing re-assessment.

The proposal is to present a framework to systematically and clearly track the decision making process, recording rationale for each step in the evolution of an idea in a way that is accessible to newcomers and long standing members of a project. The Pet Cemetery will become the integral part of the lifecycle of a project.