To face the high industrial concurrence and to remain competitive, companies are asked to work in a context of collaborative engineering environment where design rationale is a prerogative to reduce their product development time. Design rationale aims to capture the knowledge from the product design at a very early stage as those decisions have higher impacts in terms of time, cost and quality in the later product lifecycle stages. We propose, in this paper, a three-layer framework to answer to the need to capture the process design knowledge and to use the construct captured to visualize the process performances and to derive rules in order to help and assist the designers.