Design is a central activity of information systems researchers and IS practitioners are the ultimate beneficiaries and evaluators of research in the information systems field. Organizations and individuals acquire and implement information systems to make themselves more productive, that is, to change existing inefficiencies into preferred ones. It is difficult to pin down a definition of design. However Charles Eames offered the following: “A plan for arranging elements in such a way as to best accomplish a particular purpose”. Others say that design refers to the application of synthetic and analytic process to plan and create new objects. Design is often thought of in the context of creativity or invention. Design research can indeed result in the production of beautiful, useful, and better artifacts. Design research is distinctly different from explanation research. The goal of explanation research is to discover, understand, and explain phenomena associated with natural phenomenon or information systems. Explanation research methods and traditions are based on natural science. The goal of design research, on the other hand, is to invent methods and processes for designing and developing effective and efficient information systems. The methods and traditions of design research are based on design science and sciences of the artificial (Herbert A. Simon, Sciences of the Artificial, third edition, MIT Press, 1996). Design research paradigm is fundamentally a problem solving paradigm.

 

This 2-day workshop is designed to provide the attendees an introduction to a vast array of frameworks, methods and techniques by which they can learn to conduct design research to solve problems. The participants will be divided into groups. Each group will collaborate together and go through different phases of problem formulation, design IT artifact(s), evaluation metrics and techniques, share their findings and contributions.