"The purpose of this book is to illustrate the result of a many-year-long research effort. We have sought to separate the description of the theoretical part from that of its application. The result is a work organized in five parts, corresponding to the content we indicated above: the first part deals with the design collaboration, its characteristics, and the relationship with the design's quality; the second part examines the characteristics of design knowledge, the principal domains in which it is expressed, and its properties; the third part looks into the theoretical and implementative characteristics of the BKM model; the fourth part defines the characteristics of the ABCD platform and its modes of implementation; the fifth part illustrates the function of a reduced-scale prototype of the ABCD platform and its application to a case study; lastly, the conclusions discuss the future developments of the research's outcome."