An Overview of the n-dim environment

Abstract: "The premise of our work is that designers, in the process of doing their work, create models of various kinds, for various purposes, and that it is the negotiation of the structure and content of these models that comprises the bulk of the task of doing design. We give here an overview of a framework for enabling designers to capture and structure as much of the information they use and generate as is possible. We have designed and implemented such a system for creating models in a computer that can be shared with other designers in the course of an ongoing design, made persistent for future recall, classified and categorized so as to facilitate both the study of how design is done in a given organization and the study of design in general. Our system is generic enough to be useful in domains outside of design, and we posit it to be useful in general for anyone who needs to manipulate information in a structured way, an activity called Information Modelling. The acronym chosen for the system, n-dim, stands for n-dimensional information modeling, to indicate the authors' view that the total space of information under consideration is multi-dimensional in nature."