Reframing as Positive Design: An Exemplar from the Office of Civil Registry in Mexico

Systems analysts are continuously seeking innovative ways to improve their designs, often by engaging users in the process. The idea of the positive lens has been broached as a valuable approach to designing organizations and information systems. Positive design is an emergent viewpoint in the research of individuals and groups that attempts to use a positive outlook to improve companies and nonprofit organizations and the technologies they use through use of positive spoken or written words or discourse. In this paper we use a positive approach to reframing, which we situate within the perspective of the Social Construction of Technology. We provide an exemplar from our work with the Office of Civil Registry in Mexico where positive design using reframing opened the design experience to users and facilitated a successful design for resolving their problems. Positive reframing is a useful design technique for achieving positive results when faced with intractable systems problems.