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This paper contributes to the discussion on value models as decision support in early design. Emerging from data collected through semi-structured interviews with 20 professionals in 3 manufacturing companies, the paper highlights the limitation of current development practices to promote cross-functional knowledge sharing about the stakeholders' lifecycle expectations to be met. This limits the ability to make decisions about aspects of value that are difficult to assess and quantify. The objective of the paper is then to propose the use of value models as 'boundary objects' to increase shared awareness about the design intent, triggering negotiations towards more value-adding design decisions. This role of the value model as a boundary object is studied through design experiments, using a combination of protocol analysis and observation technique on the video-recorded material.