Abstract
Departing from precedents for pre-design reasoning and design processing can save designers the time and effort needed to generate new design solutions from scratch. Starting with the extraction of information from an existing design case can enhance solving a new design problem by adapting a case in its entirety or by re-synthesizing some of its features or components. In order to be of practical use, however, information inferred from precedents has to be restructured, re-organized and represented in a way that enables designers to easily refer to relevant information during the design synthesis process. Precedents can be represented in descriptive texts, sketches, drawings, relational equations, mathematical representations, circulation diagrams, lists of grammatical rules and vocabulary components, or study models. To function as effective design aids, it is helpful to present precedents in structured and categorized prototypes. In this paper, multiple classified precedent-based models are proposed to enhance engineering design analysis and derivation. The models are formulated as prototypes that inform and organize the analysis, the re-synthesis and the management of information extracted from precedents in order to make them more applicable and useful.