What Kinds of Artifacts Are We Designing? An Analysis of Artifact Types and Artifact Relevance in IS Journal Publications

Drechsler, Andreas; Dörr, Philipp

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-06701-8_23

Cited by 5 publications

(1 citation statement)

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“…Considering the artifact type is a specific challenge in the IS discipline, because a wide range of different types of socio-technical artifacts fall inside its scope. For analytical purposes, Drechsler and Dörr (2014) propose differentiating between four types of socio-technical artifacts within IS (see Table 1). Although very brief, Drechsler and Dörr's analysis indicates that explicit consideration of different artifact audience types for each artifact type can help convey an artifact's potential utility and actual utility, while disregarding them may weaken them.…”

Section: Consideration Of Specific Practitioner Stakeholder Subgroupsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Designing to Inform: Toward Conceptualizing Practitioner Audiences for Socio-technical Artifacts in Design Science Research in the Information Systems Discipline

Drechsler

2015

InSITE Conference

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This paper identifies areas in the design science research (DSR) subfield of the information systems (IS) discipline where a more detailed consideration of practitioner audiences could improve IS DSR's informing power and proposes an initial audience conceptualization in an informing system. The consequences of not considering artifact audiences in greater detail are identified through a critical appraisal of the current informing science lenses in the IS DSR literature. The paper identifies four yet underdeveloped areas in the discourse: 1) treating practice stakeholders as a too homogeneous group, 2) not explicitly distinguishing between social and technical parts of socio-technical artifacts, 3) neglecting implications of the artifact abstraction level, and 4) a lack of explicit consideration of a dynamic or evolutionary fitness perspective of socio-technical artifacts. The findings pave the way for future research to further improve the conceptualization of artifact audiences, in order to improve the informing power -and thus, impact on practice and research relevance -of IS DSR projects. The findings can also serve as a first step to bridge the theory-practice gap in and, thus, improve the informing power of other disciplines (e.g., computer science, engineering, or policy-oriented sociology) that seek to produce social and/or technical human-created artifacts of practical relevance.

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Section: Consideration Of Specific Practitioner Stakeholder Subgroupsmentioning

confidence: 99%