Product design is a highly involved, often ill-defined, complex and iterative process, and the needs
and specifications of the required artifact get more refined only as the design process moves toward
its goal. An effective computer support tool that helps the designer make better-informed decisions
requires efficient knowledge representation schemes. In today’s world, there is a virtual explosion in
the amount of raw data available to the designer, and knowledge representation is critical in order to
sift through this data and make sense of it. In addition, the need to stay competitive has shrunk product
development time through the use of simultaneous and collaborative design processes, which depend
on effective transfer of knowledge between teams. Finally, the awareness that decisions made early in
the design process have a higher impact in terms of energy, cost, and sustainability, has resulted in the
need to project knowledge typically required in the later stages of design to the earlier stages. Research in
design rationale systems, product families, systems engineering, and ontology engineering has sought to
capture knowledge from earlier product design decisions, from the breakdown of product functions and
associated physical features, and from customer requirements and feedback reports. VR (Virtual reality)
systems and multidisciplinary modeling have enabled the simulation of scenarios in the manufacture,
assembly, and use of the product. This has helped capture vital knowledge from these stages of the
product life and use it in design validation and testing. While there have been considerable and significant
developments in knowledge capture and representation in product design, it is useful to sometimes
review our position in the area, study the evolution of research in product design, and from past and
current trends, try and foresee future developments. The goal of this paper is thus to review both our
understanding of the field and the support tools that exist for the purpose, and identify the trends and
possible directions research can evolve in the future.