Motivation and Use

Design canvases have propagated widely over the past few decades, with some of the most prominent examples including the Value Proposition Canvas and its various iterations. While powerful for mounting a business case, those tools often felt tangential to the core of the engineering design process. A need was identified for a series of canvases similar in scope and intent but more cohesively grounded in engineering design. There may be other, better canvases or tools out there and readers are encouraged to drop such references in the comments of this card for others to locate, but the tools we developed and which are shared below were felt to be best tailored to our needs and, hopefully, will be of use to you as well.

We have deployed these canvases throughout our First-Year Engineering program, utilized them with Senior Capstone projects, and deployed them in several intermediate courses with design projects. In initial introduction, these tools are best accompanied by multiple content delivery sessions and activities to guide students through the underlying concepts and use of the tools. An example activity is included in the attachments below.

Summary of Tool

The collection includes several intertwined canvases, described below:

1) Problem Framing Canvas - a template to guide users through the problem framing process, including statement of the opportunity, preliminary market analysis, identification of design specifications and underpinning assumptions, collection of research questions, and exploration of potential broader impacts. The Opportunity Recognition Canvas, Stakeholder Profile Canvas, and Design Specification Canvas are suggested as subsidiary tools in populating the Problem Framing Canvas.

2) Opportunity Recognition Canvas - a template to guide users through identifying the opportunity inherent in the situation under study, including identification and analysis of stakeholders, identification of stakeholder needs, and combination into a central problem statement. Use of the Stakeholder Profile Canvas is encouraged as a subsidiary tool.

3) Stakeholder Profile Canvas - drawing from the field of anthropological study and the Value Proposition Canvas, this tool is guide for building empathy and understanding with a stakeholder group and their environment.

4) Design Specification Canvas - a guide for considering various design attributes, how those attributes might be quantified or measured, and in what ways they may represent design specifications (constraints and/or evaluation metrics). This tool is best used in conjunction with something like the Specification Source Model to help identify hypothetically relevant attributes to consider. The SSM is also included in this card but was not developed as part of this work. 

5) Modified Engineering Value Canvas - modifying the structure of the traditional value proposition canvas to better align with the Problem Framing Canvas and the NABC approach to value proposition, this template guides the user in translating the design into a clear engineering value proposition.

Note: NABC is s a framework developed by Stanford Research Institute, useful for structuring a value proposition to address: N) customer / market Needs, A) the unique Approach for addressing the needs, B) the specific Benefits of the approach with consideration of financial and non-financial Costs, and C) the approach's differentiating factors over potential Competition. Many cards include examples of the NABC framework in use, including Tools for the 3C's Workshop and Playing in the Sandbox.