Raison d'Etre: Embodying design history and rationale in hypermedia folklore—an experiment in reflective design practice

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 during 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 article describes 1) the scenarios of use the authors are trying to support, 2) the methods they used collecting and organizing the database, and 3) the status of their prototype.