The Empirics of Design Research: Activities, Outcomes and Functions

Design research (DR) has matured as an important research approach within information systems. It can be seen as a response to the quest of more focus on the IT artefact. Besides the IT artefact, there are other important artefacts to build and study in DR. There are models and prototypes which are produced during information systems development. This paper has investigated the empirics of design research, especially activities and outcomes. Based on a conceptual inquiry of design research literature and two cases of design research, a conceptual clarification of design research empirics has been established. Two cases of public e-service design form the empirical bases for this conceptual development. The empirics of design research (i.e. a design practice) is distinguished from the theorizing part of DR. Empirical data of DR to be used for theorizing consist of produced artefacts, embedded data collection for design and theory-required data collection. Three types of evaluation in DR are distinguished: Embedded evaluation in design activities, explicit formative evaluation with data from use settings and theory-required evaluation in order to assure theoretical validity of results.