A review of state-of-the-art technologies for supporting a designer's electronic logbook

It is common practice for designers in the UK to keep a personal record of their work in a paper-based logbook. These records represent a large amount of design related information that may not be recorded by other (formal) means. However, efficient access to this information is largely prevented by current paper logbooks. This could be overcome through the creation of an electronic designer's logbook, which would provide a more complete understanding of previous design issues and better support for concurrent and distributed design. Using the findings of a review of existing technology and previous work by the authors, a hybrid technology strategy is proposed which forms the technical platform for an electronic designer's logbook.