The emergence of design research in information systems in North America

Journal of Design Research

Volumn 7, Issue 1, 2008, Pages 1-16

  Kuechler, William ^a   Vaishnavi, Vijay ^b  

^a UNIVERSITY OF NEVADA   (United States)

^b GEORGIA STATE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

artefact research; design research in information systems; design research methods; design research philosophy; design science; information and communications technology; management information systems; research models; sciences of the artificial

Indexed keywords

EID: 69649107672     PISSN: 17483050     EISSN: 15691551     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1504/JDR.2008.019897     Document Type: Article

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53. Even though the focus of this section (and subsequent sections) is North America, all countries share much of the early history of IS as we relate it in this section.
54. While it is not a purpose of this paper to detail the diffusion of computer technology into global culture, we will allude frequently to the phenomenal growth of information systems over the past 45 years and a brief explanation is in order: information technology (IT) has grown to become the largest capital investment made annually for most firms because it has always had enormous perceived value to corporate management. IT success stories span 40 years – from American Airline’s early reservation system coup to WalMart’s current dominance of US retail – and the perception of IT strategic value combined with an exponentially decreasing cost curve for information and communications (ICT) technology have given IS enormous penetration and influence.
55. As of this writing, most IS researchers outside the USA are resident in schools of Informatics: frequently an amalgamation of what in the USA are the separate disciplines of IS, Computer Science, and Information Science. Recently a number of US universities have adopted a similar concept of creating a school focusing on Information, which is notably not a part of the business school.
56. The quotation: “The professional schools will reassume their professional responsibilities just to the degree that they can discover a science of design, a body of intellectual tough, partly formalizable, partly empirical, teachable doctrine about the design process” has been a rallying cry for IS design researchers for over 20 years.
57. March and Smith (1995) were among the first IS authors to use the designation design science for this type of research; many believe the term originated in the works of Buckminster Fuller (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buckminster_Fuller). Following the practice of most other design-based disciplines, we drop ‘science’ from the name, referring to the field as IS design research (ISDR).
58. Design is defined, per Simon (1996), as ‘the purposeful organization of resources to reach a goal’ (Hevner et al., 2004).
59. We intend ‘other design fields’ to refer broadly to the many areas that create artefacts for use by people through disciplined, empirical methods. We share the belief that many common cognitive, social and empirical processes underlie design in general (Jacques, 1980). Thus closely related fields such as computer science and engineering are included along with more topically distant fields such as architecture and industrial design.
60. One of the field’s self-criticisms is that the field is too broad and ill-defined. IS academics frequently have difficulty explaining to College of Business Deans and university presidents exactly what it is they teach and study. Chief Information Officers in industry have similar difficulties explaining the breadth of their activities to CEO’s (Benbasat and Zmud, 1999).
61. In prior work we surveyed over 40 papers from relatively recent IS ‘core’ and ‘relevance’ discussions as well as ISDR foundational papers. We found no references to design research outside IS.
62. For confirmation perform searches on keywords from the Topic Area column of Table 1 in either the ACM Computing Library or IEEE Xplore.