Design research: The deferred actions of the design of the National electronic Library of Infection (NeLI)
Patty Kostkova, Naresh P. Patel · UCL Discovery (University College London) · 2005
Design research is concerned with developing knowledge of the design process. However, do theoretical system design theories meet the needs of system development in the real world setting? Are technical decisions made and justified on according to system theories or do social, political and financial factors prevail? We investigated the evolution of technical design, specification and development milestones of the National electronic Library of Infection (NeLI) in the UK, one of the major government initiatives in the area of infectious diseases. By investigating project documentation, internal and formal specifications, informal email discussions where key technical decisions we made, we found out that the digital library design was rather unsystematic. We applied Purao’s standard descriptive model of design to understand the design of NeLI and compare the design process with the Theory of Deferred Action, which argues that rather than design being systematic it is subject to deferred action. In this paper, we will discuss the preliminary findings of this a work-in-progress project.