Due to increasing complexity of modern products it is many times impossible for single individual engineers to fully grasp the product they are a part of developing. Valuable time during the product development is therefore spent searching for knowledge about different aspect of the product. To enable engineers finding right knowledge in different situations, the knowledge must first of all exist. Secondly, it needs to be structured and thirdly, it needs to be accessible. In this paper all of these three aspects of design rationale (reasons for why the product is designed the way it is) are addressed with the main focus on the latter one, accessibility. An information model is presented that can be used to structure the design rationale. It also presents a schematic overview of how a cloud solution could be realized using the information model to make a complete system for instantly capturing, filtering and accessing design rationale in a contextual manner.

To enable the instant and contextual capture, filtering and access of the design rationale, the design rationale management systems should be present to the engineers everywhere in the digital environment, ready for service. It should also include functions that make the design rationale shared to all privileged users making sure everyone has updated versions of the stored knowledge.

In this work the main ideas of a method for instant and contextual capture, filtering and access of the design rationale are introduced and a pilot system described as a proof of concept. The pilot system can be used to capture, filter and access design rationale across and within text-documents, spread sheets and CAD-models.