Modern product design and development organizations have to adopt flexible and dynamic working arrangements to meet the increasingly varied demands of their customers. Knowledge, particularly during the early stages of design, is fundamental to the success of the total product design and development process. This knowledge should be easy for the design team to locate and access, it should be relevant to the design teams activities, and it should be in a format that the design team can use. To this end, this paper describes WebCADET, a WWW-based knowledge server, which supports designers during the early stages of their design decision-making activities. WebCADET aims to address some of the most significant knowledge management issues in modern design enterprises by providing effective and efficient mechanisms for the capture, storage and management of concept design knowledge.

As reliability is one of the key factors in product quality, which is closely linked to customer satisfaction, the ability of companies to design products which will be "reliable" is key to their future market success. The paper presents a new design for reliability (DFR) method which assesses the suitability of mechanical system design configurations during the early stages of the design process. The method presented in this paper is a development of the work of Stephenson (1995) in which he sought to assess the reliability of technical mechanisms in large scale heavy plant equipment. The method described in this paper is based on three internal properties of technical systems, namely simplicity, clarity and unity proposed by Aguirre (1990). This paper, however, extends Stephenson’s approach by focusing on the definition of a more rigorous method for assigning clarity levels in design configurations. This is done by assessing clarity levels at the interfaces between one component and another, building a hierarchy of functions within a configuration, and lastly matching the properties of clarity and simplicity with each function hierarchy. The DFR method is illustrated in the paper with a case study example.