In the early stages of a design project, many important issues are unknown or only known in an imprecise manner. In current practice the iterative maturation of design information is not explicitly captured alongside that information; for example, many design modelling tools require parameter values to be entered in a precise manner even if the quality of the information is known to be poor. This can cause problems in which downstream consumers of the information waste effort on tasks that are not yet justified. If the status of the information – the Quality of Preliminary Design Information (QoPDI) – could be made explicit, this could help to avoid such problems, potentially leading to reduced rework and to better designs.

QoPDI has numerous facets such as imprecision, vagueness, volatility etc. To facilitate communication of QoPDI between designers that are potentially from different departments, companies or located around the world, a common vocabulary is necessary. Therefore, a taxonomy clarifying and relating the facets of QoPDI is being developed. Building on this taxonomy, we aim to ultimately develop a tool that assists practitioners in expressing the quality of the information they produce, and in using such meta-data to assess whether information received from others justifies a particular task.

This MaD-funded project is in the early stages of a literature review. Our next goal is combining the insights from literature with analysis of current practice of handling immature information. This will be achieved by carrying out interviews at NZ-based manufacturing companies. As a result, a scheme for eliciting and expressing the QoPDI for given design information will be created. In a demonstrator scenario, a scheme for justifying whether a task is appropriate to initiate considering the QoPDI associated with its input information will be evaluated.