Design and design research as contextual practice

Development and design have always been on the agenda of the information systems (IS) discipline. Besides researching the impact of new information technologies (IT) in organisations, most IS academics feel that IS should contribute to the design and production of better IS in practice (Hevner et al. 2004; March and Smith 1995). As a consequence, the design science research paradigm has gained much popularity, as it seeks to promote knowledge of how IT artefacts can be designed and how this design can be evaluated (e.g., Gregor 2006; Hevner et al. 2004; Peffers et al. 2007). Since design science research aims at creating innovative IT artefacts (Hevner et al. 2004), it has naturally taken the IT artefact as its focal unit of interest. As such, the IT artefact is commonly understood as a bundle of features—in other words, as a self-sufficient entity that is defined by its properties where the function of an artefact is designed into its properties, and where the artefact is expected to do what it was intended to do (Ahn 1998; Benbasat and Zmud 2003; Orlikowski and Iacono 2001). This implies that, in this view, technology is deterministic in nature as its use and effect will follow from its design and function. At the same time, with the traditional focus on the IT artefact has come a need to abstract and de-contextualise in the development of design theories. Consequently, the underlying view is that the IT artefact can be usefully designed and studied separated from its context of use (Orlikowski 2010). However, such a de-contextual and deterministic view of technology has recently been contested in the literature on action design research (e.g., Sein et al. 2011) as