An integrated interface for proactive, experience-based design support.

ABSTRACTMany case-based reasoning systems have been developed to aid designers by providing them with libraries of prior design experiences. Traditionally, these systems are implemented as stand-alone ``external memories'' for the designer to query manually. This paper presents a contrasting approach that integrates proactive case retrieval into the designer's normal task processes, automatically tailoring information selection and presentation emphasis to fit changing designer needs and attention flow. The paper presents a set of principles for this integrated intelligent design support and describes their application in the Stamping Advisor, a system to support design feasibility analysis for sheet metal automotive parts. The Stamping Advisor interface proactively provides designers with relevant information to support feasibility analysis, automatically prepares their information products, and unobtrusively gathers the information needed to generate new cases to improve the quality of future support.