Alan Hevner - Design Research in Information Systems

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Alan Hevner and Samir Chatterjee Integrated Series in Information Systems Design Research in Information Systems Theory and Practice 10.1007/978-1-4419-5653-8_1 Springer-Verlag US 2010

1. Introduction to Design Science Research

Alan Hevner 1

(1)

College of Business, University of South Florida, 4202 East Fowler Avenue, Tampa, FL 33620, USA

(2)

School of Information Systems and Technology, Claremont Graduate University, 130 East 9th Street, Claremont, CA 91711, USA

Alan Hevner (Corresponding author)

Email:

Samir Chatterjee

Email:

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Abstract

Since the dawn of the digital revolution, information technologies have changed the way we live, work, play, and entertain. Designers of IT-based digital technology products play a critical role in ensuring that their designed artifacts are not just beautiful but provide value to their users. Users are increasingly interacting with a digital world. Designing interactions in this new world is a challenging task. The experiences we have when we browse the web, or visit amazon.com, sell/buy stuff on eBay or play amusing games on our mobile cell phones do have a tremendous impact on how we live our lives. Designing information systems is even more challenging.

In the same way that industrial designers have shaped our everyday life through objects that they design for our offices and for our homes, software interaction design is shaping our life with interactive technologies computers, telecommunications, mobile phones and virtual worlds. If I were to sum up this in one sentence, I would say that its about shaping our everyday life through digital artifacts for work, for play, and for entertainment.

Gillian Crampton Smith (Moggridge )

Since the dawn of the digital revolution, information technologies have changed the way we live, work, play, and entertain. Designers of IT-based digital technology products play a critical role in ensuring that their designed artifacts are not just beautiful but provide value to their users. Users are increasingly interacting with a digital world. Designing interactions in this new world is a challenging task. The experiences we have when we browse the web, or visit amazon.com, sell/buy stuff on eBay or play amusing games on our mobile cell phones do have a tremendous impact on how we live our lives. Designing information systems is even more challenging.

1.1 What Is Design? Different Perspectives

You know when you see a good design but it is often hard to define it. Charles Eames offered the following: A plan for arranging elements in such a way as to best accomplish a particular purpose. Design is the instructions based on knowledge that turns things into value that people use. It embodies the instruction for making the things. However, design is not the thing. For example, we can say that source code is design while compiled code is the thing itself.

A number of disciplines have all made design a central element in what they do. This includes architecture, engineering, computer science, software engineering, media, and art design and information systems. They all have slightly different views on what they call design.

Engineering design is the systematic intelligent generation and evaluation of specifications for artifacts whose form and function achieve stated objectives and satisfy specified constraints (Dym and Little ).

Software (engineering) design is a thing as well as a process which is conscious, keeps human concerns in the center, is a conversation with materials, is creative, has social consequences, and is a social activity (Winograd ).

When it comes to design, we are best familiar with beautiful architectures that capture our imagination. Mitch Kapor actually wrote that good software should be like well-designed buildings. They exhibit three characteristics:

• Firmness : A program should not have any bugs that inhibit its function.
• Commodity : A program should be suitable for the purposes for which it was intended.
• Delight : The experience of using the program should be a pleasurable one.

Our interest in this book is to understand design and its role in both the academic discipline and practice we call the information systems. Design in information systems is both an iterative process (set of activities) and a resulting product (artifact) a verb and a noun (Walls et al. ). Very simply stated, design in information systems deals with building software artifacts which solve a human problem. The designed artifact must be evaluated to show that not only does it solve the problem but also does it in an efficient manner by providing utility to its user. But how does one conduct design research? Is design a research methodology? Is design even a scientific paradigm?

1.2 What Is Research?

To explain fully what is research or how to do research is beyond the scope of this book. However, the thesis we are explaining is a type of research method we call design science research. Hence in that context, it is important to know a little bit about research.

Research can be very generally defined as an activity that contributes to the understanding of a phenomenon (Kuhn ). Phenomenon is typically a set of behaviors of some entity that is found interesting by the researcher or by a group a research community. Understanding is knowledge that allows prediction of the behavior of some aspects of the phenomenon. Everywhere, our knowledge is incomplete and problems are waiting to be solved. We address the void in our knowledge and those unresolved problems by asking relevant questions and seeking answers to them. The role of research is to provide a method for obtaining those answers by inquiringly studying the evidence within the parameters of the scientific method.

Research is a process through which we attempt to achieve systematically and with the support of data the answer to a question, the resolution of a problem, or a greater understanding of a phenomenon. This process, frequently called research methodology , has eight distinct characteristics:

• Research originates with a question or problem
• Research requires a clear articulation of a goal
• Research follows a specific plan of procedure
• Research usually divides the principal problem into more manageable subproblems
• Research is guided by the specific research problem, question, or hypothesis
• Research accepts certain critical assumptions
• Research requires collection and interpretation of data or creation of artifacts
• Research is by its nature cyclical, iterative, or more exactly helical

1.3 Is Design a Science?

There is considerable debate in the community whether design is a science or a practice. What constitutes a science is a big question that is perhaps outside the scope of this book. But we would like to understand the elements of how science is structured? Vannevar Bush (1945) had said that science has two end points on a scale: Basic fundamental research (typically funded by federal agencies such as NSF) and applied research (typically funded by corporations). Any science develops and evolves over time and proceeds through various stages. A useful tool that is often used to analyze the development of science is the Stokes matrix (see Fig. ).

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