This paper describes a generic approach to guiding
designers when making decisions during the early stages
of design. The objective of the research is to enable designers
to foresee unintended life-cycle consequences during mechanical
component design. Engineering design is a process of evolving
solutions to a design problem through the commitment of
decisions. As a designer commits a new design decision,
a more concrete design solution is generated. Decisions
made can have intended and unintended consequences on the
performance of the life phase activities that follow, such
as manufacturing, assembly, and disposal. Many existing
tools only consider the impact of the design solution on
later life-cycle phases when the solution is almost complete.
This makes changes expensive and difficult. This paper
presents a novel approach to how consequences encountered
in down stream life-cycle phases can be brought to the
designer's attention early in generation of component
form. For this purpose, a knowledge model has been derived
from a phenomena model. The phenomena model describes how
life-cycle consequences are generated during component
synthesis. An insight into the representation of the resultant
knowledge model is discussed through examples. The implementation
of a prototype Knowledge Intensive CAD tool, entitled FORESEE,
aimed at supporting life-oriented, feature-based component
synthesis and exploration, is also described. The results
of the evaluation of FORESEE with a range of designers
show that by using the system designers are motivated to
explore alternative design solutions and are able to make
more informed design decisions. This highlights that the
knowledge structure provides a base for extending feature-based
component design to a ‘Design Synthesis for Multi-X’
approach.