Studying the Creation of Design Artifacts

As software and information systems (IS) increase in functional sophistication, perceptions of IS quality are changing. Moving beyond issues of performance efficiency, essential qualities such as fitness for purpose, sustainability, and overall effectiveness become more complex. Creating software and information systems represents a highly interconnected locus in which both the generative processes of building design artifacts and articulating constructs used to evaluate their quality take place. We address this interconnectedness with an extended process-oriented research design enabling multi-modal neurophysiological data analyses. We posit that our research will provide more comprehensive assessments of the efficacy of design processes and the evaluation of the qualities of the resulting design artifacts.