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Making Use of Design Principles

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Tackling Society's Grand Challenges with Design Science (DESRIST 2016)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 9661))

Abstract

This paper reports on the results of a study that investigates how design principles are used in design practice. Design principles have become the predominant way to capture abstract knowledge about the design of information systems (IS) artifacts—and as design science researchers, we expect that practitioners will use these outcomes of our work. Our empirical evidence is drawn from the analysis of spoken-out thought processes of designers as they attempted to use a certain set of design principles in a new context. Through our analysis, we identify five key categories conceptualizing the use of design principles: interpreting scope and content, matching with problem space, guesstimating missing information, projecting into solution space, and implanting into design process. We find that design principles do not shut down degrees of freedom, but rather, channel actions from the designer, who acts in a conscious, deliberative manner to creatively apply the design principles. Through our work, we contribute to (a) our understanding of how design principles are incorporated in design processes, and (b) the emergent stream of research about the formulation of design principles.

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Acknowledgements

This research is funded by the Research Fund of the University of Liechtenstein (Forschungsförderungsfonds der Universität Liechtenstein).

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Liechtenstein, Vaduz, Liechtenstein

    Leona Chandra Kruse & Stefan Seidel

  2. Bentley University, Waltham, USA

    Sandeep Purao

Authors
  1. Leona Chandra Kruse
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  2. Stefan Seidel
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  3. Sandeep Purao
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Stefan Seidel .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Memorial University of Newfoundland, St. Johns, Canada

    Jeffrey Parsons

  2. University of Jyväskylöä, Jyväskylä yliopisto, Finland

    Tuure Tuunanen

  3. Curtain University, Bentley, Australia

    John Venable

  4. Innovation Value Institute, Maynooth University, Maynooth, Co., Kildare, Ireland

    Brian Donnellan

  5. School of Computing, Dublin City University, Dublin 9, Ireland

    Markus Helfert

  6. Intel Labs Europe, Leixlip, Ireland

    Jim Kenneally

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Chandra Kruse, L., Seidel, S., Purao, S. (2016). Making Use of Design Principles. In: Parsons, J., Tuunanen, T., Venable, J., Donnellan, B., Helfert, M., Kenneally, J. (eds) Tackling Society's Grand Challenges with Design Science. DESRIST 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9661. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-39294-3_3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-39294-3_3

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

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