A Granular View of Knowledge Development in Design Science Research

Abstract

Design science research (DSR) should contribute to both the prescriptive and descriptive knowledge bases. Despite its maturity, a granular understanding of how DSR develops knowledge, while utilizing and contributing prescriptive and descriptive knowledge, remains incomplete. Creating such a granular understanding requires a detailed typology of design knowledge, a unifying vocabulary of operations, and an identification of which operations can be applied to produce different knowledge types. We propose that “triplets of dynamic knowledge”, relating source and target knowledge types through operations, can be defined, and combined to develop design knowledge. We provide a vocabulary of operations on knowledge types and investigate the relationships between knowledge types and operations. We illustrate triplets that can improve fitness, projectability or confidence. The goals of the granular view of knowledge development are to guide researchers without constraining them, and to progress a finer-grained description and accumulation of knowledge development in DSR.