What kind of car is this sales support system? On styles, artifacts, and quality-in-use

The lack of usability of software and poor design of programs is the secret shame of the industry." This statement opens a "design manifesto" from a top manager in the US IT industry arguing that systems developers and programmers often lack "the design viewpoint" and need a supplementary design competence similar to that of architects and industrial designers. The IT Design Quality Project aims at contributing to that contextual IT design competence of designing for usability. The project is based on the assumption that improvements in the IT design process fundamentally depend on improvements in the IT designers' ability to assess and appropriate the quality of the contextual products of this process. In approaching this problem the project is inspired by "theories of styles" in other design fields. Hence, the main goal of the project is to contribute to a contextual theory of styles in the design of information technology. Such a "theory of styles" will contain basic concepts and a repertoire of exemplars for reflections on, and communication of, the contextual design quality of IT artifacts. In this chapter we will outline the background and approach of the project, relate the concept of styles to the field of IT, outline a conceptual design framework for studying technical, social and subjective aspects of IT-in-use, and reflect upon methods of inquiry used in a few initial exploratory case studies. We conclude our reflections on style, and a pragmatic design theory of IT-in-use with a scenario of an international virtual design studio and exhibition the Qualitheque.