This is the published version of a paper published in Design Issues. Citation for the original published paper (version of record):Nylen, D., Holmström, J., Lyytinen, K. (2014) Oscillating between four orders of design: the case of digital magazines. IntroductionThe rapid evolution of digital technologies has significantly affected most industries and their design practices. This is particularly evident in the publishing industry: Historically dominated by a graphic design culture, design decisions mainly concerned page layouts. Increasing digitalization, however, presents publishers with an expanded set of design challenges ranging from device form factors (industrial design), to user experience (interaction design) and business logic (environmental design). In this paper, we examine the characteristics of the new design processes that emerge, asking: As publishing companies move increasingly into digital design, what are the new design challenges, and how can they be dealt with?Against this backdrop, we conduct an exploratory case study of a leading Swedish media company-Bonnier-and its efforts at designing a digital magazine. The design project was carried out by a global multi-disciplinary team and resulted in a digital publishing platform called Mag+. Developed for tablet-based content delivery on the iPad, Mag+ integrates new interaction design principles with a magazine concept to achieve a rich user experience, while introducing a new business model governing the production, distribution, and billing of the content. We apply Buchanan's model of the four orders of design, 1 combined with extant research on digitalization, 2 to analyze the design process. The study shows that as digitization enables loose couplings between formats and contents and therefore relaxes design constraints within and between orders; designing in digital spaces involves simultaneous challenges in all four orders of design. Further, not only do some design decisions manifest a co-dependency between two orders, they are also likely to cause ripple effects on other orders. We also posit that digital capabilities change the design process-in that digital design processes involve unprecedented dynamism and frequent iterations between the four orders. Overall, we contribute to multi-order design theory by heeding the specific effects of digitalization on design spaces in the publishing industry.
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Purpose The purpose of this paper is to investigate how digital innovation processes emerge and evolve in organizational settings, and how serendipitous and unbounded digital innovations affect organizations’ overall digital directions. Design/methodology/approach The authors draw on an interpretive case study of the Church of Sweden, tracing in detail the design, deployment and governance of an interactive website for digital prayer, the Prayer Web (PW). Findings The findings show how the site came about in a serendipitous manner, created by an advertising agency as part of a marketing campaign. In turn, the unbounded nature of digital innovation was revealed as the wide and rapid adoption of the PW raised issues concerning the church’s overall digital direction linked to centralized control, as well as the nature and role of pastors, prayer and communities, as the site allowed people to post prayers and spread their messages (initially with no moderation). Originality/value The authors explore the serendipitous and unbounded ways in which digital innovation emerged and evolved in a traditional organization with a long legacy as an important societal institution. The paper contributes by generating rich insights on the role of the distinct aspects of digital technology in serendipitous and unbounded digital innovation. It particularly highlights how the editability and reprogrammability of digital artifacts triggered unexpected new behaviors and governance requirements in the organization under study. The authors encourage further research into the interrelationship between multiple unbounded and serendipitous digital innovations in an organization over time.
Construction site operations often involve multiple actors with substantial variations in assumptions, expectations, and knowledge about technology. This could impair digitalization, which involves development of socio-cognitive environments that foster use of digital technology in new organizational procedures. Nevertheless, construction industry digitalization research has mainly addressed firm-level transformation of engineering phases and focused on technology, largely ignoring challenges arising from cognitive differences among actors at construction sites. Thus, we report a case study of attempts to spark construction site digitalization through a shared information management system (IMS). Applying technology frame of reference theory, we demonstrate how differences within groups among actors' frames (inconsistency) shape group-level frame misalignment (incongruence) and thus digitalization outcomes. The IMS was implemented successfully at the focal firm's headquarter and regional office levels. However, substantial construction site-level frame inconsistency led to misaligned group-level expectations and generated a fragmented socio-cognitive environment that hindered strategic digitalization. In conclusion, socio-cognitive environments at industry, construction site, and group levels recursively shape individual frames, and harmonization of frames is important to realize construction digitalization.
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