Research Perspectives: The Anatomy of a Design Principle

Abstract

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.

Improving healthcare access management by predicting patient no-show behaviour

“…Steps such as the facilitated formulation of a design principle, data collection strategies, data processing steps, and the selection of models to use are relevant issues for every designer facing a similar challenge. Additionally, by using the schema proposed by Gregor et al [45], our design principle also meets the five criteria for reusability: accessibility, importance, novelty, and effectiveness [87]. Therefore, we expect that other DSS designers can build from this experience when defining intervention groups.…”

An Update for Taxonomy Designers

“…Such taxonomies describe a phenomenon of interest and provide preliminary knowledge on what can be done. In this way, they provide prescriptions for design and action (Gregor et al 2020). For example, identifying and structuring software features using a taxonomy to prescribe how existing and new software should be (re)designed (see Scho ¨bel et al 2020 for an example).…”

Designing Call to Action: Users’ Perception of Different Characteristics

“…Design principles inform the designers to develop instances from artifacts that belong to a similar class (Gregor, Kruse, & Seidel, 2020). Second, we will develop a framework to design data governance mechanisms.…”