Epistemological Perspectives on Design Science in IS Research

Design science is an established approach in IS research and the literature provides us with a fruitful discussion on its basic concepts, for instance, the IS research cycle (Hevner, March, Park and Sudha 2004), IT artifacts (Orlikowski and Iacono 2001; Weber 2003), or design theories (Markus, Majchrzak and Gasser 2002; Walls, Widmeyer and El Sawy 1992). However, many authors advocating the stance of design science often neglect the influence of basic philosophical and epistemological issues on design science. “The major emphasis of such debates [on positivism and interpretivism] lies in the epistemologies of research, the underlying assumption being that of natural sciences[, not of design science].” (Hevner et al. 2004, p. 98) Here, design science is often, to our understanding incorrectly, advocated as a third paradigm that adds up to positivism and interpretivism (Hevner et al. 2004; Vaishnavi and Kuechler 2006). However, also design scientists seek to conduct research and to evaluate their research results. At this juncture, we argue that the understanding of such concepts as ‘research rigour’, ‘research validity’ and also ‘research quality’ heavily depends on the underlying epistemological understanding, also in design science! In order to demonstrate and operationalize our argument, we will analyse Hevner et al.’s guidelines for design science in IS research (2004) taking an interpretivist perspective informed by Klein & Myers’s set of principles for conducting and evaluating interpretive field studies (1999). As a result, we will epistemologically reformulate the existing design science research guidelines and provide a basic outline for an interpretivist perspective on them.