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The objective of this thesis is to develop a design enabler to support requirements capture throughout a design project. A literature review was conducted on requirement modeling tools based on the following features: providing feedback, having a boilerplate, tracking changes, prioritization, lifecycle management throughout the design project, documentation and having a controlled vocabulary. There is an opportunity to develop a new tool because of the gaps seen in requirement modeling tools that incorporate prioritization, lifecycle management throughout the design project and controlled vocabularies. The Requirements Authoring Design Enabler (RADE) covers all the features mentioned above. RADE provides real time feedback to the user in requirement authoring through error messages. The requirements are written against a boilerplate or template and the tool tracks changes through date stamped documentation. There is a drop-down menu to prioritize requirements through their criticality and the tool is meant to be used throughout the lifecycle of a design project. In terms of documentation RADE has a database view for authoring and a document view to display the requirements written and their justification. The design enabler has two controlled vocabularies, one for the modality and the other for the verbs. These controlled vocabularies are used to capture the criticality of requirements and to classify requirements as functional or non-functional respectively. RADE could also open new avenues of research to explore using requirement evolution to predict project health. The key requirements of this tool are ensuring complete requirement authoring, capturing changes and supporting reasoning. The tool is developed in excel with Visual Basic for Applications (VBA). A controlled vocabulary is used for the modality and the verbs and free vocabulary used for the subject, test, stakeholder and owner columns. The tool has been tested in a first-year mechanical engineering course where pre-service engineers were tasked with writing their definition of a requirement as well as their understanding of the components of a requirement before and after a lecture on the RADE. The pre-service engineers were given time to generate requirements using the tool and asked to provide feedback for refinement.