Design rationale

A design rationale is an explicit documentation of the reasons behind decisions made when designing a system or artifact. As initially developed by W.R. Kunz and Horst Rittel, design rationale seeks to provide argumentation-based structure to the political, collaborative process of addressing wicked problems.

A design rationale is the explicit listing of decisions made during a design process, and the reasons why those decisions were made. Its primary goal is to support designers by providing a means to record and communicate the argumentation and reasoning behind the design process. It should therefore include:

Several science areas are involved in the study of design rationales, such as computer sciencecognitive science,artificial intelligence, and knowledge management. For supporting design rationale, various frameworks have been proposed, such as QOC, DRCS, IBIS, and DRL.

While argumentation formats can be traced back to Stephen Toulmin's work in the 1950s datums, claims, warrants, backings and rebuttals, the origin of design rationale can be traced back to W.R. Kunz and Horst Rittel's development of the Issue-Based Information System (IBIS) notation in 1970. Several variants on IBIS have since been proposed.

...
Wikipedia