Developing Design Principles for Green IS Facilitating Sustainable User Behavior: A Design Science Research Approach

The health of ecosystems is vital for the existence of human life on our planet. As we witness large-scale deterioration of the natural environment, consequences of climate change call for innovative solutions to guide the process of sustainable development. Despite the critical role of information systems (IS) for facilitating sustainable action, research on Green IS in this context has been limited. Our study addresses the question of how to design Green IS for sustainable user behavior by following a design science research approach intended to formulate a novel design theory. In particular, this paper focuses on the product design by deriving and evaluating theory-based design principles that promote sustainable user behavior. Our resulting Green IS product propositions guide scholars as well as practitioners in the design of Green IS for sustainable user behavior and provide a basis for future research

Digital Sustainability in Information Systems Research: Conceptual Foundations and Future Directions

In this editorial, we develop the concept of digital sustainability for the IS community. By systematically reviewing the Green IT and Green IS literatures, we show that the IS field has lagged behind current discourse in practice and therefore lacks the conceptualization of the relationships between digital technologies and sustainability. Digital sustainability is defined in this editorial as the development and deployment of digital resources and artifacts toward improving the environment, society, and economic welfare. We hope that this editorial motivates IS researchers to engage in digital sustainability as an emerging research area

Practicing what we preach? Reflecting on environmental sustainable research practices of the IS community

Over the past decade, research on IS solutions for environmental sustainability evolved and produced a modest but firm body of knowledge. Despite this progressive understanding about ICT’s solution potential for environmental sustainability, our research practices seem widely unaffected by these insights. Most of us travel by air for work several times a year, to conferences, research stays, or guest lectures. Our community meetings do not seem well aligned with ecological goals. We research and apply technologies, such as blockchain or artificial intelligence, without sufficiently acknowledging the enormous amounts of energy they consume. It raises the fundamental question: Do we practice what we preach? While recognizing the good intentions IS research pursues, should we no longer ignore the environmental ‘elephant in the room’? In this inclusive panel discussion, we openly debate these issues. Thereby, we intend to capture the status-quo of the sustainability of our research practices and develop recommendations on how to improve it and ways of measuring the carbon footprint of some key activities

Coastal Resilience with Social Data Analytics: A Design Science Approach

We adapt a design science approach (DSR) for coastal resilience and climate justice using big data analytics. Our big data and machine learning based artifact can accommodate various sets of social attributes to understand coastal risks for vulnerable communities. We analyzed social data from communities vulnerable to coastal hazards by incorporating machine learning (ML) to assess coastal community needs and demands. In addition, we developed a user interface that provides data selection and weighting functionalities. We extend IS literature in design science research and ML techniques to further our understanding of coastal resilience in vulnerable communities. The outcomes of this research can help community members and policy makers understand and develop robust sustainability and climate focused decisions using a coastal resilience decision approach

Guiding Design Principle Projects: A Canvas for Young Design Science Researchers

Particularly young researchers face challenges in organizing large design science research (DSR) projects and often struggle to capture, communicate, and reflect on important components to produce purposeful outcomes. Making informed decisions at the project start, such as selecting suitable kernel theories and development procedures, is of great relevance because they affect the entire design process and the resulting design products. Although DSR can produce different types of outcomes, from more situational artifacts to more abstract design knowledge, scholars point to the need for generalizing insights collected in such projects to advance the knowledge base. As design principles are among the prevailing forms of such design knowledge, this paper builds a visual inquiry tool—represented as a canvas—that navigates researchers through common components for crafting design principles and leverages collaborative reflections on essential project decisions. To build our canvas, we adapt inquiry-based learning (IBL) guidelines and visual inquiry tools to DSR education. Evaluations with doctoral students revealed promising indications for the canvas’s applicability and usefulness in guiding iterative DSR projects, reflecting on basic components, and communicating work-in-progress to other scholars and practice. Overall, we complement the body of DSR literature by providing an educational visual inquiry tool for producing design principles

Information Systems for Sustainable Use of Water in Smart Cities: A Review and Call for Future Research

Water is the basis of life—that being said, the rising scarcity triggered by climate change and urbanization is an increasingly important challenge in urban areas. The United Nations present “water” as one of 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and experts make impassionate calls for sustainable water management solutions as a seminal part of smart cities. While there are numerous research efforts in the IS community regarding certain SDGs and smart cities, we demonstrate in a structured literature review that urban water scarcity is still a blind spot. In this paper, we present pathways for future research alleys on this topic. We sketch out a vision for a smart city water system that is based on a novel information system. We draw on the energy informatics framework as a theoretical basis for our work and provide a context-specific discussion on its transferability to the resource of water in smart cities. By introducing urban water scarcity to the IS research agenda and showing opportunities as well as boundaries for the transfer of the energy informatics framework, we hope to stimulate IS researchers to be more active in pursuing research efforts in this pressing topic

Making sense of business analytics : the case of two start-ups

Business analytics have enabled businesses to leverage unstructured and dispersed data in order to improve their operations and position themselves better within a highly turbulent environment. While much discussion has been focused on how businesses can move from data to insights to decision making, much less is known around how businesses actually interpret the insights provided by business analytics tools. This extended abstract proposes the use of sense-making as the theoretical lens for interpreting these insights, combined with contextual information. We will be using two case studies to further explore the applicability of our proposition

Proposing Design Principles for Sustainable Fire Safety Training in Immersive Virtual Reality

Immersive Virtual Reality (IVR) technologies are frequently adopted by organizations for safety training. Safety training in IVR engages and motivates employees to develop skills in how to manage hazardous situations. By employing IVR for safety training, organizations and employees can develop safety knowledge and increase their sustainability awareness. In this paper we develop design principles for sustainable fire safety training in IVR. The principles were developed through an Action Design Research (ADR) case. The paper demonstrates how ADR can be used to design individual training environments and how the method supports the development of more generic design principles for such environments. The design principles are subsequently proposed as: Design for Multimodal Risk Perception, Design for Empathetic Safety Cognition, Design for Formative Hazard Inspection, and Design for Comfort in Uncomfortable Decision Making

Educative Sensemaking on Social Media: An Empirical Investigation of Informal Learning on YouTube

Educational videos on social media are widely used in informal learning. However, empirical studies hardly look into sensemaking, a key aspect in the construction of meaning and knowledge, of educational videos on social media in informal learning, despite the growing interest and practice in educative sensemaking. This study addresses this research gap. We draw upon sensemaking theories and investigate how the physical properties of educational videos affect sensemaking. Our research shows how information control, anchor, and noise are associated with committed interpretation in the learning communities to understand the scientific inquiry at hand with data from YouTube educational videos. This study makes timely contributions to the literature on the educative sensemaking in informal learning on social media. It also offers insights into the better design of educational videos to facilitate sensemaking and informal learning