Framing design: a social process view of information system development

This paper discusses a social process model for design activity in organizational IS development projects,based upon the findings of an interpretive, participant observation study of information system designprocesses in a mid-sized UK telecommunications equipment manufacturing company. The form of theproposed model is a dual-cycle dialectic between opening up the design problem and narrowing down designsolutions; it is also a dialectic between individual and group design activity in the context of participation ina social community of design practice. A social cognition perspective was used to analyze the activities ofdesign in context; implications of the findings of the study for a process model of design activity are contrastedwith managerial assumptions and practices imposed by the use of the traditional, decompositional model ofdesign.The paper has important implications for theory and practice. From a theoretical perspective, it is suggestedthat design team intersubjectivity regarding the goals and legitimacy of the process of design is a bettermeasure of progress and design “completeness” than intersubjectivity regarding the form and requirementsof the target information system. From a practical perspective, the adoption of a dual-cycle, convergencemodel of design might facilitate the management of detailed design activities between project milestones. Thefindings also have implications for the management of organizational “learning”: if organizational problemsolvingprocesses are seen as involving distributed and emergent knowledge, then an explicit goal ofintersubjective understanding is not only inappropriate, it is not attainable.