research-article

The constitutive and the instrumental in social design

Author:

Murali VenkateshAuthors Info & Claims

DESRIST '09: Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Design Science Research in Information Systems and Technology

Article No.: 14, Pages 1 - 18

https://doi.org/10.1145/1555619.1555638

Published: 07 May 2009 Publication History

Abstract

Simon's <u>The Sciences of the Artificial</u> is rightly influential as a founding text in design research in the information systems field (IS). Simon's contributions in the same volume to what he calls social planning and human design - practices associated with the development of societal scale artifacts that foster a "humane society" - are much less visible in IS design research. I develop and expand on some of Simon's insights here using social design projects such as IT-based civic networks as my context, drawing on a civic network development project called the Urban-net that I have tracked since its inception in 1996. I define some distinctive features of such projects and advance an institutionalist conception of actors (designers) and action. Despite noting that "nothing is more fundamental in setting our research agenda and informing our research methods than our view of the nature of the human beings whose behavior we are studying" (Simon 1985; emphasis added), and despite his recognition that social planning projects often are quite different from other types of technical projects in the demands they make on actors, Simon's (1996) discussion is not moved by a sufficiently nuanced view of the designer. Apropos, and drawing on a sociological institutionalist view of social actors and action, I outline a model of two inter-related design activities: constitutive design - targeting design of the normative or institutional foundation and governance mechanisms - and instrumental design, where designers specify the system to be built within the agreed-upon normative constraints. I conclude with a brief account of the Urban-net case.

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Cited By

Dell DVenkatesh MMai J(2012)Social design's implications for the IS fieldProceedings of the 2012 iConference10.1145/2132176.2132221(346-353)Online publication date: 7-Feb-2012
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2132176.2132221
Neris VAlmeida LCunha de Miranda LHayashi EBaranauskas M(2011)Collective Construction of Meaning and System for an Inclusive Social NetworkInternational Journal of Information Systems and Social Change10.4018/jissc.20110701022:3(16-35)Online publication date: 1-Jul-2011
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.4018/jissc.2011070102

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DESRIST '09: Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Design Science Research in Information Systems and Technology

May 2009

288 pages

ISBN:9781605584089

DOI:10.1145/1555619

Conference Chair:
Vijay Vaishanvi,
Program Chair:
Sandeep Purao

Copyright © 2009 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 07 May 2009

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DESRIST '09: Design Science Research in Information Systems and Technologies

May 7 - 8, 2009

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Cited By

Dell DVenkatesh MMai J(2012)Social design's implications for the IS fieldProceedings of the 2012 iConference10.1145/2132176.2132221(346-353)Online publication date: 7-Feb-2012
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2132176.2132221
Neris VAlmeida LCunha de Miranda LHayashi EBaranauskas M(2011)Collective Construction of Meaning and System for an Inclusive Social NetworkInternational Journal of Information Systems and Social Change10.4018/jissc.20110701022:3(16-35)Online publication date: 1-Jul-2011
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.4018/jissc.2011070102

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