Reverse Engineering Or Design Recovery: Two Approaches To Uncovering Designing

Many design problems are evolutionary and the need to uncover an existing design is an important part of the design process. Reverse engineering and design recovery are two terms that are often used to describe this process, but in fact the two have very different intentions. Reverse engineering or as we refer to it in this paper, product dissection, is an activity with the goal of recovering the mechanisms of an existing artifact. Design recovery is an activity with the goal of recovering the design processes that went into creating the artifact. Each of these are important elements of designing but we propose that design recovery is the activity students should engage in when learning to design. In other words, product dissection is one of the skills a designer may use in designing, whereas design recovery is a means of discovering design skills.