What Is Design Science?

Abstract

To do a design science project, you have to understand its major components, namely, its object of study and its two major activities. The object of study is an artifact in context (Sect. 1.1), and its two major activities are designing and investigating this artifact in context (Sect. 1.2). For the design activity, it is important to know the social context of stakeholders and goals of the project, as this is the source of the research budget as well as the destination of useful research results. For the investigative activity, it is important to be familiar with the knowledge context of the project, as you will use this knowledge and also contribute to it. Jointly, the two major activities and the two contexts form a framework for design science that I describe in Sect. 1.3. In Sect. 1.4, I show why in design science the knowledge that we use and produce is not universal but has middle-range scope.