The Beauty of Messiness: A Flexible Tool for Design Principle Projects

Abstracting and formalizing knowledge collected throughout a design science research (DSR) project is important to inform the design of future artifacts. Design principles are one of the prevailing forms to capture design-relevant knowledge and guide both research and practice to build new artifacts. Although today's DSR projects are often agile and creative, they require a minimum structure to ensure rigor. In this paper, we set out to master the tradeoff between creative messiness and fully standardized design endeavors by presenting a situational tool in the form of a card deck. We report on the building of a design tool and its demonstration via two illustrative examples. Overall, we complement the valuable body of DSR frameworks and introduce a flexible and configurable tool capable of taking into account specific project situations.