Communicating nascent design theories on innovative information systems through multi-grounded design principles

Abstract

One central goal of design science research (DSR) is to generate, extract and communicate knowledge about the design of an artifact. Design science researchers ultimately strive to contribute knowledge in the form of mature design theories; mere descriptions of the artifacts are not regarded as sufficient contributions to knowledge anymore in scholarly publications. There is an increasing body of guidelines on how to produce and publish mature design theories. However, not every research project is in that state. To publish intermediate results (i.e. nascent theories), only general, abstract publication schemes can be found in the recent literature making it difficult to publish design knowledge at that intermediate level. In this paper, we contribute an extension of an existing publication scheme, tailored towards the publication of such intermediate, work in progress design knowledge in the form of prescriptive design principles. This scheme was designed with respect to the complexity of today’s information systems IT artifacts. To demonstrate the scheme’s applicability, we will apply it to one of our recent scholarly publications in the CSCW area. We argue that this publication scheme extension will help to communicate design knowledge in earlier project stages, which allows a faster feedback to the knowledge base that will enable a broader community to participate in the “search process” for an optimal design solution.