Portraying Design Essence

Recent discourse in the Design Science Research community addresses the necessity to accumulate and reuse design knowledge. However, design methods are complex and so are the traditional ways to document design knowledge. Inspired by the high business and academic impact of Business Model Canvas, we argue that a single-page portrayal of nine design elements can help designers to capture design knowledge and eventually share it with other designers. This paper reports on our attempt to create, demonstrate, and evaluate an instance of such tools, one that we call the Portrait of Design Essence.