This paper illustrates a scheme for representing design knowledge as separately described information aggregates or orderings. Different knowledge structures, while analytically separate, have the ability to interact computationally by borrowing services from one another through the process of delegation. Each knowledge structure is implemented, in a prototype-oriented knowledge description language, as a collection of design-concept entities arranged according to property inheritance. Interaction across different inheritance orderings involves sharing information across entities which are not related by inheritance. The extra representational capacity, which supplements the structural information-sharing of inheritance, is achieved by the computational technique of object-to-object message delegation. Delegation allows separately described design analyses to be loosely coupled. In this way, static information structures both maintain their independence and can be made useful for a variety of unanticipated purposes. The authors' knowledge representation language is used to develop a putative design of a plastic, injection mouldable container and to illustrate how this helps knowledge based support of the design process. More complex applications of delegation between knowledge structures involves: a variety of implicit search styles; a variety of disciplines for memorizing attributes, values and behavioural links; and the dynamic creation of fresh information structures having differing longevities. These more complex examples indicate how the modelling capabilities of the representation language lend themselves to memorized querying routes and searches for general, specific or unanticipated responses to the form of a query. Searches for objects which satisfy property-requirements, as directed by chains of delegated message communications between objects, provides a powerful framework for supporting the dynamic human activity of exploration. The paper argues that this combination of static and dynamic property sharing is fundamental to generic object-oriented representation of design information and that it is not supported effectively in the mainstream object-oriented languages.