Effortless capture of design output a prerequisite for building a design repository with quantified design output

In this paper, we argue for building a repository for capturing, tagging and sharing design output (prototype) and activities (process), enabling researchers to better discover and understand causalities in early stage product development (PD). Ultimately, we want to understand how to handle uncertainty, ambiguous information, and vast solution spaces in early-stage PD by studying the designers' ability to learn (i.e. reflect and adapt). This paper presents a theoretical view, and serves as a starting point for researching the output of the early-stage PD as output from the activities done by the participants (i.e. designers), accumulated over time. Further on, such sequential outputs (and activities) may be uploaded into a shared repository that can be used for both research and practice. To show how this theoretical framework translates into actual projects, we describe a use-case of prototyping injection molding tools, followed by showing a tangible example of starting such a repository. As gathering data on activity and output in product development is a cumbersome and time-consuming process, the instrument must be nonintrusive and time-efficient.