Digital Innovation as Design of Digital Practice: Doctors as Designers in Healthcare

Medical professionals are increasingly assuming the role of maker and creator. At the same time, digital innovations, as part of evolving information infrastructures, are becoming increasingly prevalent in healthcare. In this paper, we adopt a Schönian approach to understand how a medical professional, who is not an IS designer by trade, engages in the design of digital practice -” turning what may appear as a failed digital innovation effort into a successful design of digital practice. Our inquiry suggests three pragmatic principles that call for further investigation: (a) professionals can make a significant contribution to design work by inventing means for fact-based, reflective engagement with the situation; (b) the reorganization of work practice involves organizational design, information system design, and communication design; and (c) developing design as digital practice entails the development of fact-based design practice and must engage practical theories

Argumentation in large, complex practices

Differences arise in macro-activities, such as the production of energy, food, and healthcare, where the management of these differences happens in polylogues as many actors pursue scores of positions on a variety of issues in numerous venues. Polylogues are essential to the large-scale practices that organize macro-activities but present significant challenges for argumentation theory and research. Key to the challenge is conceptualizing the variety of argumentative roles that go beyond the classic normative definition of protagonist and antagonist. A macroscope is devised for identifying argumentative roles in the communicative work of organizations, and the communicative work of the network of organizations, related to the production of gas from shale in the Marcellus region of the Northeastern United States. The macroscope scaffolds a design thinking inquiry into the variety of argumentative roles in the communicative work of organizations in a polylogue and finds: (1) innovation and entrepreneurialism in the design of organizations as devices for managing disagreement; (2) argumentative roles as services specializing in particular aspects of argument; and (3) networks of organizations with prominent types of specialized roles that give shape to the disagreement space around a large, complex practice. It is proposed that the varieties of argumentative roles in polylogue are not random or arbitrary but derive from more general pragmatic principles about how disagreement is organized and how methods of disagreement management emerge within communication relative to a macro-activity

Proceedings of the Inaugural Meeting ofAIS SIGPrag

The Special Interest Group on Pragmatist IS Research (SIGPrag) was approved by the Association for InformationSystems (AIS) council at its June 2008 meeting in Gallway. The motivation for this initiative is the growingrecognition of the importance of theorizing the IT artifact and its organizational and societal context from apragmatic and action-oriented perspective. SIGPrag\u27s mission is to provide a much-needed centre of gravity and tofacilitate exchange of ideas and further development of this area of IS scholarship.In summary, pragmatist IS research rests on the following set of assumptions: * Human life is a life of activity.* Humans do things that effect changes in their environment and/or within themselves.* Doing permeates thinking, conceptualizations and language use.* Human consciousness is a practical one that is in constant interplay with interventive, investigative, andevaluative actions.* Practical consciousness is formed by experience from previous actions and participation in social contexts.* IT and information systems are fundamentally symbolic language systems.* Linguistically expressed collective presuppositions, norms and categories (such as those embedded in ITand information systems) serve human activity and life.* The true value of IT and information systems lies in their potential to support human communication andcollaboration central to human activity and life.For more information about SIGPrag, its mission and current activities, please visit http://www.sigprag.org/The inaugural meeting of SIGPrag is to be held in Paris on Dec 14, 2008, in conjunction with the InternationalConference on Information Systems (ICIS). The meeting will consist of two parts, a scientific meeting and abusiness meeting. For the scientific meeting a call for position papers was issued in the summer of 2008, whichresulted in the following papers being selected for presentation:• What Kind of Pragmatism in Information Systems Research? by Göran Goldkuhl.• Pragmatic Approach in IS Projects Grounded on Recognised Frameworks by Raija Halonen.• Co-Design as Social Constructive Pragmatism by Mikael Lind, Ulf Seigerroth, Olov Forsgren, and AndersHjalmarsson.• Pragmatism and Information Systems (IS): Neurophilosophical approach by Garikoitz Lerma Usabiagaand Francesc Miralles.• Sustainability Communication: A role for IT and IS in relating business and Society by Mark Aakhus andPaul Ziek.• Managing Ambiguity while Reducing Uncertainty by Gianni Jacucci and Mike Martin.• A Pragmatic Conception of Service Encounters by Mikael Lind and Nicklas Salomonson.• Making the Web More Pragmatic: Exploring the Potential Of Some Pragmatic Concepts For IS ResearchAnd Development by Jens Allwood and Mikael Lind.• Introducing Human in Complex System: A Cognitive Pragmatics Based Model by G. Lortal.• The Pragmatic Web: An Application View by Mareike Schoop.• Design Research from a Communicative Perspective: How to Design Things with Words by Hans Weigand.• Representation and Correspondence: On the Validity of the Representation Assumption in InformationSystem Design by Pär J. Ågerfalk and Owen Eriksson.• Habermas’ theory in action by Jan L.G. Dietz.• Challenges to Information Systems Development by Roland Kaschek.The idea behind this inaugural meeting was to bring together people that share an affinity with pragmatist ISresearch and to initiate a scientific discussion about the role of pragmatist research in IS. We certainly hope that thisdiscussion will continue over the years to come. The papers are freely available for download athttp://www.sigprag.org

Researching the Disruptive Nature of Open and Social Technologies: A Pragmatic Agenda

Researching the Disruptive Nature of Open and Social Technologies: A Pragmatic Agend

Discovering Argumentative Patterns in Energy Polylogues: A Macroscope for Argument Mining

A macroscope is proposed and tested here for the discovery of the unique argumentative footprint that characterizes how a collective (e.g., group, online community) manages differences and pursues disagreement through argument in a polylogue. The macroscope addresses broader analytic problems posed by various conceptualizations of large-scale argument, such as fields, spheres, communities, and institutions. The design incorporates a two-tier methodology for detecting argument patterns of the arguments performed in arguing by an interactive collective that produces views, or topographies, of the ways that issues are generated in the making and defending of standpoints. The design premises for the macroscope build on insights about argument patterns from pragma-dialectical theory by incorporating research and theory on disagreement management and the Argumentum Model of Topics. The design reconceptualizes prototypical and stereotypical argument patterns for characterizing large-scale argumentation. A prototype of the macroscope is tested on data drawn from six threads about oil-drilling and fracking from the subreddit Changemyview. The implementation suggests the efficacy of the macroscope’s design and potential for identifying what communities make controversial and how the disagreement space in a polylogue is managed through stereotypical argument patterns in terms of claims/premises, inferential relations, and presentational devices

The communication logics of computer-supported facilitative interventions: A study of the community of practice and social technologies surrounding the use of group decision support systems in process facilitation

Computer supported facilitation is a form of third party intervention that uses advanced information technology to deliver non-authoritative intervention on organizational decision making. The goal of this type of intervention is to create communication events where decision making and decision outcomes are collaboratively produced by those who have a stake in the decision. The facilitator's role is to assure decision making progress without taking sides or rendering a final decision. The obligations of facilitation form competing injunctions for practicing facilitation. Facilitative intervention must be performed so that it influences decision activity without influencing decision outcomes, facilitators must participate in decision making without becoming a party to the decision, and facilitators must enforce decision procedures without coercing participant acceptance of the procedures. The evolution of the field is marked by innovations in practice and role definitions that seek more effective means to reconcile the competing demands of the role and the changing circumstances of the intervention context. Computer supported facilitation is a technologically advanced form of intervention that combine skills of facilitators with the capacities of collaborative computing technology to more efficiently and effectively deliver decisions for organizations facing a choice. The facilitator designs and carries out interventions by using group decision support systems that enable anonymous participation, simultaneous communication of ideas, geographic and chronological distribution of participation, and the electronic storage of contributions. This investigation finds that while technical advances help facilitators overcome the numerous barriers to decision making communication, the advances in technique and technology are prescriptions for decision making communication built on inadequate descriptive assumptions about the nature of communication. The community of facilitation practice and its technologies operate on the dubious assumption that communication process and content are in fact distinct. The community of practice, however, is caught up in preserving this distinction as its solution to the paradoxes of doing non-authoritative intervention. The dissertation demonstrates this state of affairs by showing the set of premises for facilitative action embodied in the process management view of the practice, the methods of transparency work which uphold intervention neutrality, and the way the community treats an innovation on practice