Experiment Canvas for QbD Knowledge Management
How can a scientist or an engineer design, plan, communicate and execute experiments?
Welcome to the Experiment Canvas — you can map out your entire experiment on one piece of paper.
A scientific experiment can be described with 6 basic building blocks.
1. The Goal and Background of the experiment;
2. The hypotheses, that are Specific and measurable,
3. The Constraints to your experiment, such as resources and time
4. The ION diagram that lists your input, output and noise variables with specific levels
5. The Factor Tree to communicate the design of the experiment
6. And finally the Plan to show the progress and next steps of the experiment.
Experiment Canvas was inspired by Problem Solving A3, Business Model Canvas, and Design of Experiments
and I refined it over numerous experiments with scientists and engineers over the last few years.
This works well for any scientist or engineers in any industry.
Feel Free to Use it (Please attribute the Source when you share).
Download the PowerPoint Template Here
Make sure you print it in 11 x 17 or A3 sized paper with “fit to scale” turned on.
Experiment Canvas by Sun Koo Kim is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Based on a work at http://QbDWorks.com.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://QbDWorks.com.
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How can you design, plan, communicate, and improve your experiment?
A scientific experiment can be described with 6 basic building blocks.
Text board goes up out of the scene. Index cards with icons (details below) show up.
The Goal and Background of the experiment,
The hypotheses, that are Specific and measurable,
Process/Product map visually lays out the variables included in the experiment.
The Constraints to your experiment, such as resources and time
The ION diagram that lists your input, output and noise variables with specific level
The Factor Tree to communicate the design of the experiment.
And finally the Plan to show the progress and next steps of the experiment.
But it’s not sufficient to just enumerate the 6 building blocks.
What you really want to do is to map them out in a pre-structured canvas.
This is what we call the Experiment Canvas– the tool that helps you plan, discuss, design and execute scientific and engineering experiments.
Let’s briefly go through the 6 building blocks
Starting with the Goal and Background, this is where you state how this experiment ties into the the project goal. It should also explain what triggered the project or the study.
Hypotheses are the assumptions that will be tested during this experiment. They must be specific and measurable.
Process/Product map visually lays out the variables included in the experiment. Variables include X’s as inputs or process parameters to Y’s as outputs or quality attributes and importantly, noise factors that you will monitor or control during the experiment.
Every experiment costs money and time.. This section addresses the resource questions such as budget, time, equipment and material availability so that you can discuss them with managers. This will determine the number of your experiment runs.
ION Diagram is the summary of the experiment.You list the input parameters, X’s, their associated levels for testing, predictions and the output attributes, Y’s. The part most scientists forget is the noise section…where the surprises come from.
The Factor Tree communicates the “design” of the experiment and the number of runs. If it is a DOE, then this will show whether this is a fractional, full factorial or a placket burmann, etc.
The plan section is the mini project management of the experiment. This section shows what the next steps are, done by whom and by when.
So with the Experiment Canvas, you can map out your entire experiment on a piece of paper. This works well for any scientist or engineers in any industry.