Toward Third Wave Information Systems Research: Linking Sociomaterial Practice with Broader Institutional Logics

The sociomaterial movement has done much to strengthen the theorizing of IT artifacts in practice. This “second wave” information systems research, which focuses on theorizing of the interpenetration of IT artifacts and human activity, is a response to the positivistic, reductive accounts that overly simplified human activity around the development and adoption of IT in the name of generalizability. However, with their focus on local ideographic interpretation, sociomaterial views have abandoned the search for regularities across contexts and across time. In this paper, we take a step toward a “third wave” approach as we look to theoretically account for both idiosyncrasies in sociomaterial practice in situ, and the regularities across these practices. Drawing on institutional logics and the concept of sociomaterial practice, we develop a conceptualization that highlights how technologies afford the enactment of different practice scripts as users draw on different institutional logics

Tensions in design principle formulation and reuse

Designing can be viewed as a collective activity that accumulates and reuses knowledge over time and, in the information systems field, such knowledge often takes the form of design principles. While design principles are now a predominant from to capture, accumulate, and reuse design knowledge, their reusability cannot be taken for granted. In this paper, we present the preliminary findings of an ongoing series of experiments that aim to explore the characteristics of design principles that facilitate or inhibit their reuse. Our preliminary findings suggest that, interestingly, these characteristics occur as contradicting elements. We situate the tensions in the light of hermeneutics, expert intuition, and C-K design theory. We hope that, through our ongoing work, we can trigger further discussion on design principles reuse in the DSR community

Integrating Explanatory/Predictive and Prescriptive Science in Information Systems Research

The scholarly information systems (IS) field has a dual role. As an explanatory and predictive science, the field contributes to explaining the pervasive IS that shape the digital age and sometimes also makes predictions about those phenomena. As a prescriptive science, it participates in creating IS-related innovations by identifying means-ends relationships. The two can beneficially interact, such as when explanatory theory provides the basis for generating prescriptions or when applicable knowledge produces explanatory insights. In this commentary, we contribute to integrating these two roles by proposing a framework to help IS researchers navigate the field’s duality to extend the cumulative scholarly knowledge that it creates in terms of justified explanations and predictions and justified prescriptions. The process we describe builds on ongoing, dynamic, iterative, and interrelated research cycles. We identify a set of integrative research practices that occur at the interface between explanatory and predictive science and prescriptive science—the explanation-prescription nexus. We derive guidelines for IS research

Designing with Autonomous Tools: Video Games, Procedural Generation, and Creativity

Designers are increasingly using autonomous tools to perform complex activity more quickly and in different ways, often with little or no human intervention. These autonomous tools are changing the way many designers approach their work, and the creative outcomes of that work. On the one hand, autonomously generated designs might not provide the same creative user experience as manually designed con-tent, because autonomous tools are fundamentally deterministic in nature. On the other hand, the potentially creative benefits of using autonomous tools relate to the potential variety—that may be perceived as unpredictability by the designers—of their output. We report on a study of three cases of video game development that use procedural generation of content and we theorize about how organizations manage for creative user experiences when using autonomous tools in videogame production. We find that they address the inherent tension between determinism and variety by using a set of modular design practices that help guide autonomous tools in ways that allow for open-endedness and creativity. We refer to these practices as “architectural structuring” and “injecting variety” and we propose that the “level of modularity” as well as the “level of manual design” are critical for creative outcomes. We generate propositions associated with the two practices