Client as designer in collaborative design science research projects: what does social science design theory tell us?

This paper reports a study of a design science research project in which researchers in computer science and earth science collaborated to attack a looming problem in the earth sciences – the need to analyze data of different types (satellite data at various resolutions, text, raster, and vector). The motivations of the two partners appeared complementary – the computer scientists needed a hard problem to solve to focus their research, and the earth scientists had a hard problem in need of solution. This study uses theory and research on design from the social sciences to explore the experience of users who are included as partners in a design project. It finds that it is very difficult for a client partner to enter the ‘design world’ as full collaborators.