Designing to Inform: Toward Conceptualizing Practitioner Audiences for Socio-technical Artifacts in Design Science Research in the Information Systems Discipline

This paper identifies areas in the design science research (DSR) subfield of the information systems (IS) discipline where a more detailed consideration of practitioner audiences could improve IS DSR’s informing power and proposes an initial audience conceptualization in an informing system. The consequences of not considering artifact audiences in greater detail are identified through a critical appraisal of the current informing science lenses in the IS DSR literature. The paper identifies four yet underdeveloped areas in the discourse: 1) treating practice stakeholders as a too homogeneous group, 2) not explicitly distinguishing between social and technical parts of socio-technical artifacts, 3) neglecting implications of the artifact abstraction level, and 4) a lack of explicit consideration of a dynamic or evolutionary fitness perspective of socio-technical artifacts. The findings pave the way for future research to further improve the conceptualization of artifact audiences, in order to improve the informing power – and thus, impact on practice and research relevance – of IS DSR projects. The findings can also serve as a first step to bridge the theory-practice gap in and, thus, improve the informing power of other disciplines (e.g., computer science, engineering, or policy-oriented sociology) that seek to produce social and/or technical human-created artifacts of practical relevance.