Artifact
The Design Canvas, describes a design science process from the start with the “Justification knowledge” to the end of the DSR process with the “Design Knowledge”. The process consists of the start and end building blocks and seven intermediate building blocks.
The intermediate blocks contain the considerations which must be consulted during the realization of the grounded design science project. The fields are categorized in three layers: “Scope”, “Method” and “Result”. Each layer contains the corresponding blocks. The scope-layer includes the basic tasks of a DSR process and defines the field where the project is located. The “Problem” block contains the formulation of the identified problem. This problem should be as clear as possible and demark the field of research. The “Objective” block includes the statement how the problem can be tackled using DSR. The content of the third building block, “Idea”, describes the basic idea how the objective of the project can be reached. Furthermore, the last scope-block determines the “Context” where the problem is located, to define the domain the problem is located.
The next group of building blocks is categorized as “Method”-blocks. All blocks in this part describe the method which should be used to reach the objective of the project. The first block “Design Process” describes which design process should be used for the project. This can be one of the given approaches which are also available in MDP (as templates, see section 3.1). As mentioned in the previous section this field can be edited freely to keep a maximum of flexibility to edit the process and custom-ize available DSR processes for the specific project needs. The “Evaluation”-block should describe the evaluation method which is used for the project, method and artifact evaluation. To du so, several methods like the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) [13] and the appropriate single items are possible evaluation methods for the design project.
The last category contains the “Result” of the conducted DSR project. In DSR this is the so called “Artifact” this can be e.g. a software prototype or even a model for something which solves the problem descripted in “Problem”.
At the end of the process the gathered “Design Knowledge”, so everything useful learned during the process is summarized in this last building block. The Design Canvas provides an overview over the whole DS process allows a fast and easy overview over the project. Additionally, it can be used to evaluate given projects and ideate for new projects. To do so and evaluate the Design Canvas we redocumented 3 projects in the DSR field.