The Design Lab: Re-thinking What to Design and How to Design

Over the last decades there has been a dramatic change in the design agenda within the field of IT design. With the increase of mobile and wireless devices and the massive expansion of Internet availability the classical object of design - the dedicated information system targeted towards a well-defined user group - is about to vanish. Even if we conceive the setting where information technology is used as a 'system' this system can hardly be seen as the outcome of a system design process. Arguably, IT design is today guided by new design agendas. Ubiquitous computing and from the user side information ecologies seem to be more appropriate labels of the emerging technology. The object of design has correspondingly been changing from systems to devices, tools or information appliances. This radical opening of the question of what to design has led to an apparent confusion on how to design. Just as the field of information systems  is about to mature with a broad and widely accepted repertoire of design approaches and methods, ranging from workflow analysis to user involvement, this battery of approaches is loosing ground in favour of more techno centric explorations, such as Tangible Computing. In our view there seems to be a growing divide between mainly North American contributions to IT design emphasing new information technology concepts such as ubiquitous computing, tangible interaction and augmented reality, and mainly European contributions emphasizing the role of particular information technology applications in the light of in-depth studies of the potential contexts of use.