Abstract. As a commentary to Juhani Iivari’s insightful essay, I briefly analyze design science research as an embodiment of three closely related cycles of activities. The Relevance Cycle inputs requirements from the contextual environment into the research and introduces the research artifacts into environmental field testing. The Rigor Cycle provides grounding theories and methods along with domain experience and expertise from the foundations knowledge base into the research and adds the new knowledge generated by the research to the growing knowledge base. The central Design Cycle supports a tighter loop of research activity for the construction and evaluation of design artifacts and processes. The recognition of these three cycles in a research project clearly positions and differentiates design science from other research paradigms. The commentary concludes with a claim to the pragmatic nature of design science.

Information System (IS) research can be seen as a rich tapestry of paradigms, methods, and research approaches. Amongst others, design science is an established approach in IS research and the literature provides us with a comprehensive and useful debate on the basic concepts. However, many researchers advocating the stance of design science, neglect the influence of basic philosophical and epistemological issues on design science. Here, design science is often advocated as a third paradigm that adds up to positivism and interpretivism. Instead, we argue that the understanding of such concepts as ‘research rigor’, ‘research validity ’ and ‘research quality ’ depends heavily on the underlying epistemological understanding, and this certainly applies to design science! In order to demonstrate and operationalize our argument, we analyze Hevner et al.’s guidelines for design science in IS research (2004), taking an interpretivist perspective influenced by Klein & Myers’s set of principles for conducting and evaluating interpretive field studies (1999). Instead of arguing in favor of a specific epistemology, we seek to develop opportunities for epistemological diversity in design-oriented IS research and wish to

challenges for action research projects

Design Science is an old hat, but why is a debate on design science in today’s IS research so necessary? Here, I would like to make an argument from my personal perspective, reflecting the German research tradition, which is—in great parts—strongly oriented towards design science research (Niehaves

Design Science has, in the past few years, become a topic of increasing importance especially in the North American academic IS community. Some observers see a new hegemony in the process of forming. Others dispute that, but suggest that Design Science is merely the latest bandwagon rolling through the IS domain. The panel includes supporters of all these views. It will attempt to

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While organizations in software industry want to portray themselves as professional in terms of following standards and methods, they may also have needs for improvising and short-cutting when necessary. Such dilemmas of dual logics are sometimes internally resolved by evolving a false belief of what is done (practice) being in correspondence to what is said (standards), regardless of what an empirical investigation might show, something that can have poor business implications and also poor social implications. Particularly focusing on this latter point, the meta-methodology of total systems interventions (TSI) has been used for integrating critical systems theory with total quality management, improving social conditions in parallel with improving business processes. Although TSI is not designed for liberating organizations where nobody see themselves in need of liberation, the hypothesis of this paper is that it is possible to design quality management systems as “conflict machines”, causing sufficient social tension for more or less automatically changing “fake quality” into “real quality”. The hypothesis is investigated by applying design research in a Scandinavian public sector organization. The findings consist of statistical and interpretative evidence for the success of the approach, making a contribution to how TSI can be applied in the software industry.

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Based on reviewing foremost literature, the paper discusses various design science research methodologies along with their case studies. It concentrates on activities (tools, methods, actions) that are used while constructing an artefact. We have identified common activities RFFXUULQJ DFURVV µGHVLJQ ¶ VWHSVF ZKLFK were not indicated in their methodologies. Combining them and drawing on that finding, we propose a concept of reference model, which gives more insights and additionally dissipates design science high level of abstraction. O I.

Research Article As user interactions have become more central to specific classes of information systems, design theorizing must expand to support the processes of interaction and the evolution of information systems. This theorizing goes beyond user-aided, participatory design to consider users as designers in their own right during the ongoing creation and recreation of information systems. Recent theorizing about an emerging class of tailorable systems proposes that such systems undergo an initial, primary design process where features are built in prior to general release. Following implementation, people engage in a secondary design process where functions and content emerge during interaction, modification, and embodiment of the system in use. This case study reveals that people are engaged designers, framed by dualities in behaviors including planned and emergent behaviors, and participatory and reifying behaviors. We contribute to design science research by extending work on tailorable systems, investigating processes of secondary design in a highly interactive system suited to support user engagement. We also contribute more broadly to design science research by explicitly extending behavioral aspects associated with the use of information system artifacts.