This essay derives a schema for specifying design principles for information technology-based artifacts in sociotechnical systems. Design principles are used to specify design knowledge in an accessible form, but there is wide variation and lack of precision across views regarding their formulation. This variation is a sign of important issues that should be addressed, including a lack of attention to human actors and levels of complexity as well as differing views on causality, on the nature of the mechanisms used to achieve goals, and on the need for justificatory knowledge. The new schema includes the well-recognized elements of design principles, including goals in a specific context and the mechanisms to achieve the goal. In addition, the schema allows: (1) consideration of the varying roles of the human actors involved and the utility of design principles, (2) attending to the complexity of IT-based artifacts through decomposition, (3) distinction of the types of causation (i.e., deterministic versus probabilistic), (4) a variety of mechanisms in achieving aims, and (5) the optional definition of justificatory knowledge underlying the design principles. We illustrate the utility of the proposed schema by applying it to examples of published research.

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This paper reports on the results of a design science research (DSR) study that develops design principles for information systems (IS) that support organisational sensemaking in environmental sustainability transformations. We identify initial design principles based on salient affordances required in organisational sensemaking and revise them through three rounds of developing, demonstrating and evaluating a prototypical implementation. Through our analysis, we learn how IS can support essential sensemaking practices in environmental sustainability transformations, including experiencing disruptive ambiguity through the provision of environmental data, noticing and bracketing, engaging in an open and inclusive communication and presuming potential alternative environmentally responsible actions. We make two key contributions: First, we provide a set of theory-inspired design principles for IS that support sensemaking in sustainability transformations, and revise them empirically using a DSR method. Second, we show how the concept of affordances can be used in DSR to investigate how IS can support organisational practices. While our findings are based on the investigation of the substantive context of environmental sustainability transformation, we suggest that they might be applicable in a broader set of contexts of organisational sensemaking and thus for a broader class of sensemaking support systems. What are appropriate design principles for IS for sensemaking (i.e., sensemaking support systems) in environmental sustainability transformations? To address this question, we conducted a design science research (DSR) study to develop a set of design principles that concern a class of information systems,

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This paper investigates how information systems design professionals use design principles (extracted from a prior design science research project) in a new design situation. We do this by capturing think-aloud protocols from experienced design professionals who are given access to potentially useful design principles. Our analysis identifies two dimensions of use: design behaviors (what designers do) and application modes (how designers apply the principles). Mapping across the dimensions suggests two use pathways: forward chaining and backward chaining. Our study shows how empirically studying expert designers can shed light on the microprocesses of design principles in use, and how an empirical turn in the investigation can contribute to clarifying the fundamental nature of design principles. We conclude by highlighting the implications of these insights for crafting more useful design principles.

Recent discourse in the Design Science Research community addresses the necessity to accumulate and reuse design knowledge. However, design methods are complex and so are the traditional ways to document design knowledge. Inspired by the high business and academic impact of Business Model Canvas, we argue that a single-page portrayal of nine design elements can help designers to capture design knowledge and eventually share it with other designers. This paper reports on our attempt to create, demonstrate, and evaluate an instance of such tools, one that we call the Portrait of Design Essence.

Wine tasting is a multisensory collective activity because it involves other senses in addition to sight and hearing. The importance of these multiple senses for wine tasting makes it more challenging to digitalize than other collective activities. We conducted an ethnography and used a semiotic analysis to explore the strategies to digitalize wine tasting sessions. In so doing, we examined how small artisanal winemakers and wine merchants in Austria, Germany, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, and Switzerland moved their wine tasting sessions online to compensate for their lost key revenue streams during the global Covid-19 crisis. Based on our analysis, we present a typology of virtual wine tasting and illustrate how the approach to digitalize wine tasting evolved from a reactive approach to a more proactive one. We also identify strategies to digitalize wine tasting and characterize its social space. We discuss some avenues to regard virtual wine tasting as something more than just a digital representation of in-person wine tasting session by highlighting the mediating role of an information system. Finally, we propose some implications for digitalizing other multisensory collective activities.

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