L16 - Pragmatism and Design Research Flashcards
Pragmatism (Van de Ven, 2007)
Focus on practical solutions and problem solving.
Tries to build a bridge between rationalism (deductive) and empiricism (inductive).
When adopting a pragmatist view the focus is not on truth or false more on the fact if it is usable.
Abduction (Van de Ven, 2007)
Go back and forth from induction to deduction in a spiral movement to understand a phenonema better
An inference to the best explanation at a given point in time, and then you accept that you will get a better explanation later on.
Design Scinece Research (Hevner et al., 2004)
It is fundamentally a problem solving paradigm used to solve real life problems
When working with design research, we seek to create innovation/artifacts to solve real problems.
IS research cycle (Hevner et al., 2004)
First, we try to design IS artifacts. Basically these IS artifacts should provide some kind of utility, they should benefit the users of these artifacts.
When you have created the artifacts, you should use behavioral science research to test and evaluate these artifacts. This could be used to generate some kind of theory about the artifacts which could be lead back to the design science research.
Explain design as a noun and a verb (Hevner et al., 2004)
Design is both a process (set of activities) and a product (artifact)
Design is an artifact (noun)
• Artifacts could be constructs, models, methods and instantiations
o E.g. a business model can be an artifact that comes through a design process. In order for it to be a design research you have to theorize and test it.
Design is a process (verb)
• Different activities that you can do to:
o Develop/build or Justify/evaluate
IS Design research framework (Hevner et al., 2004)
The figure shows that things are divided into 3 overall domains:
• Environment (organisations, people (business), technologies)
• IS Research
• Knowledge Base
These three domains should be linked together.
It starts with a problem in the environment, which can be related to people, organizations or technology. These problems create business needs that you need to solve.
Moving on to IS research domain, you have the design as a verb where you develop/build artifacts and then you Justify/evaluate the artifacts using qual + quant methods.
In the knowledge base you have two different kind of knowledge.
• Foundations
• Methodologies
It is preferred that you think about the knowledge base before you move into the IS Research.
It is expected that your IS Research base will develop something that you can deliver back to the knowledge base.
How is Design Science in IS described? (Hevner et al., 2004)
Design-science research in IS addresses what are considered to be wicked problems. That is, those problems characterized by:
• unstable requirements and constraints based upon ill-defined environmental contexts
• complex interactions among subcomponents of the problem and its solution
• inherent flexibility to change design processes as well as design artifacts (i.e., malleable processes and artifacts)
• a critical dependence upon human cognitive abilities (e.g., creativity) to produce effective solutions
• a critical dependence upon human social abilities (e.g., teamwork) to produce effective solutions
Critique of design research
• The existing knowledge base is often insufficient for design purposes and designers must rely on intuition, experience, and trial-and-errors methods.
- Rigorous evaluation methods are extremely difficult to apply in design-science research. If we want to understand whether something works or not works, then we have to evaluate things.
- Sometimes in Information Research we tend to say that things are groundbreaking and it works so good, however if we evaluate the different systems, maybe we can find out why the systems actually work.
