On Epistemological Diversity in Design Science – New Vistas for a Design-oriented Is Research?

Information System (IS) research can be seen as a rich tapestry of paradigms, methods, and research approaches. Amongst others, design science is an established approach in IS research and the literature provides us with a comprehensive and useful debate on the basic concepts. However, many researchers advocating the stance of design science, neglect the influence of basic philosophical and epistemological issues on design science. Here, design science is often advocated as a third paradigm that adds up to positivism and interpretivism. Instead, we argue that the understanding of such concepts as ‘research rigor’, ‘research validity’ and ‘research quality’ depends heavily on the underlying epistemological understanding, and this certainly applies to design science! In order to demonstrate and operationalize our argument, we analyze Hevner et al.’s guidelines for design science in IS research (2004), taking an interpretivist perspective influenced by Klein & Myers’s set of principles for conducting and evaluating interpretive field studies (1999). Instead of arguing in favor of a specific epistemology, we seek to develop opportunities for epistemological diversity in design-oriented IS research and wish to contribute to establishing a constructive pluralism of research perspectives.