Raison d'etre: capturing design history and rationale in multimedia narratives

Raison d'Etre is a hypermedia design history application. It provides access to a database of video clips containing stories and personal perspectives of design team members recorded at various times through the course of a project. The system is intended to provide a simple framework for recording and organizing the informal history and rationale that design teams create and share in the course of their collaboration. This paper describes (1) the scenarios of use we are trying to support, (2) the methods we used collecting and organizing the database, and (3) the status of our prototype.