design – Page 2 – Improvising Design

Design as a trajectory of goal-definitions

The collaborative design of system solutions for wicked problems seems to follow a trajectory of goals, as the group’s understanding of the design progresses. The key to making (and evaluating) progress is understanding what triggers the changes in goal-direction. From

Improvising Design

This blog discusses how we design information system solutions for real-world problems. The focus of IS design has moved â€œupstreamâ€ of the waterfall model, from technical design to the co-design of business-processes and IT systems.Â This focus requires an improvisational

The Co-Design of Business & IT Systems December 25, 2014
Business analysts, change managers, and IT systems analysts are in a no-win situation. They are expected to understand myriad interpretations of the business strategy, reconcile conflicting viewpoints on how business processes work, and – somehow – define a coherent set
Design Methods as Performative Objects July 11, 2014
Brown and Duguidâ€™s (2001) concept of a â€œnetwork of practiceâ€ has been niggling away at my consciousness. The idea is that a collection of people are enabled to understand each othersâ€™ work because of commonalities in practice, but not to
Responsive Web Design March 12, 2014
I manage the website for an Animal Rescue shelter. I have been struggling with the design of the site for some time now, as I have some users who are still using IE6 under windows XP (on an SVGA screen),
On Realizing The Relevance of Actor-Network Theory September 24, 2013
A recent emphasis on sociomateriality appears to have entered the IS literature because of discussions by Orlikowski (2010) and the excellent empirical study of Volkoff et al. (2007). Now that people have been sensitized to the literature on material practice,
Designing Social Media Platforms For Online Learning January 14, 2012
Recently, I have been using a new social media platform to run one of my classes. The idea was, that as we are studying social informatics, we could study the effect of using social media on our own workflows first
Organizational Forms Of Coordination February 25, 2011
I have been working for a while on comparing the results from some very complex research studies of collaborative design in groups that span disciplines or knowledge domains. I was stunned to realize that I had different types of group
The Potential of Interaction Design August 5, 2010
While browsing and working on a recent paper, I mused on the missed opportunity of interaction design. Reading Terry Winograd’s (1997) From Computing Machinery to Interaction Design, I was stunned to see how visionary this was, in the context of
Thank you, NSF! May 12, 2010
I just filed the final project report for my Career Award yesterday, so I’d like to give my personal thanks to the good folks of the Human-Centered Computing group at the Computing, Information Systems & Engineering (CISE) Directorate of the
Chapter 1 of Book Available May 11, 2010
Chapter 1 for Improvising Design book has been uploaded. The first chapter discusses why we need better models and methods for design … and why design is improvisational. Doubtless, stuff will be shifted around a little, as I complete my
Design as Bricolage. April 12, 2010
The core problem of design is to use a problem-representation that can allow people to communicate the structures in their "mental jigsaw picture" to others.