Blending Practices to Facilitate Grounded Design Research: A Praxeological Research Perspective

In this paper, we reflect on the experiences from two Grounded Design (GD) research projects conducted by a multidisciplinary group of researchers between 2019 – 2021 and highlight the methodological foundations and related obstacles for iterative designing. Both projects investigate the phenomena of knowledge sharing and crisis-related learning in business organizations under the GD paradigm, which has been increasingly adopted within the Computer- supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) community. During these projects, the researchers with backgrounds in computer science, business informatics, software engineering, and sociology experienced the need for systematization to transition between the stages of GD. Looking back, we realize that our teams arrived at this systematization by blending the prior knowledge from team members’ original educational backgrounds. While blending practices most likely happens intuitively in interdisciplinary projects, as is often the case of the user-centered design initiatives seen in CSCW and Human-Computer Interaction, little can be found on how this usually happens and its implications. In this paper, we respond to this literature gap by discussing how this blending can facilitate the realization of GD projects and lead to a praxeological information science research perspective, which has ‘methods appropriation’ as key to systematizing abstraction, broader traceability, and flexibility of research methods.