Abstract — The importance of low power consumption is widely acknowledged due to the increasing use of portable devices, which require minimizing the consumption of energy. Energy dissipation is heavily dependent on the software used in the system. Applying design patterns in object-oriented designs is a common practice nowadays. In this paper we analyze six design patterns and explore the effect of them on energy consumption and performance. Keywords — Design Patterns, Embedded Systems, Energy Consumption, Performance Evaluation, Software Design and Development, Software Engineering.I. I NTRODUCTION HE vast majority of microprocessors being produced today are incorporated in embedded systems, which are mainly included in portable devices. The later ones require the lowest power operation achievable, since they rely on batteries for power supply. Furthermore, high power consumption raises other important issues, such as the cost associated with cooling the system, due to the heat generated. A lot of optimization efforts have been made, regarding the hardware used, to decrease power consumption [1]. However, recent research has proved that software is the dominant factor in the power consumption of a computing system [12]. Design patterns name, abstract and identify the key aspects of a common design structure that make it useful for creating a reusable object-oriented design [5]. Modern software design practice points towards the direction of design patterns, thanks to the advantages they ensue. Indeed, the software generated is reusable and flexible thus being much of a help to designers. For the aforementioned reasons, it is strongly recommended in the designers’ community that they use design patterns whenever possible. In this paper, we take a rather unconventional approach in evaluating the application of design patterns: We compare the energy being consumed in six C++ [11] code examples,