REQUIREMENTS FOR A MOBILE KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT SYSTEM IN ENGINEERING DESIGN

As products become more complex, a significant amount of design knowledge support is required by designers during the design process. However, given that design activity is not only confined within a design office, knowledge support must be provided to designers even when away from their usual workplace. This provision of knowledge is essential to the successful product development, and is also important to the enhancement of a company’s competitiveness. Furthermore, design knowledge is dynamic in nature, and this implies that practicing designers require continuous learning resources. This growing synergy between knowledge management and learning will eventually result in better engineering design support. With the ever-increasing popularity of mobile devices (such as PDAs, smartphones and pocket PCs), access to information, knowledge and learning resources can be greatly facilitated. The contribution of this paper consists of the identification of a set of requirements and system functions necessary for the development of a mobile Knowledge Management (mKM) system that integrates mobile devices within the knowledge management loop to support engineering designers situated in mobile work settings with design knowledge and learning