Academic and practitioner literature consistently promote user-oriented approaches to design and innovation of IT such as Design Thinking, User-Centered Design, Participatory Design, and Socio-technical design. Meanwhile, academic literature reports limited uptake of the principles and methods from these approaches in the IT industry and argues that it is difficult to integrate them into the larger set of software engineering practices of software development teams.
Yet, positions such as 'interaction designer', ‘user experience designer’, and 'service designer', are common in the Norwegian IT industry. There is, however, surprisingly little empirical research on the designer's role in the IT industry. In this thesis project, 1-2 highly motivated students are to explore the roles, practices, and challenges of ‘designers’ in the Norwegian IT industry.
Some relevant questions to be explored:
- What is their work, skillset, and what kind of 'design' do they focus on (e.g., what is the ends, means, and scope of design)?
- How is their work integrated into the larger software development team and their practices?
- What approaches, methods, and techniques do they use?
- What are their challenges?
- How does the answer to some of these questions compare with the conceptualizations and findings of existing academic literature?
The empirical work of the thesis will consist of data collection through interviews, focus groups, and contextual inquiry with designers working as consultants or in-house with IS design.
The master students will be part of the DHIS2 Design Lab, working together with a larger group of master students and researchers in exploring various aspects of IT design and innovation. The DHIS2 Design Lab mainly focuses on design and innovation within the DHIS2 software ecosystem. However, understanding the broader practices related to IS design in the IT industry is relevant to our ongoing work on supporting and promoting design and innovation within the software ecosystem. The project will hence contribute directly to our work on strengthening design, development, and innovation practices in the ecosystem around DHIS2 - the most widely used health management information software in the world.