Design Archaeology: Generating Design Knowledge from Real-World Artifact Design

When formulating prescriptive design knowledge in design science research (DSR), we usually reflect on our vision of created artifacts, relevant design decisions, and what we have learned throughout the design process. Seldom do we attempt to extract prescriptive knowledge from existing and widely acknowledged artifacts in the manner of ex-post facto or in situ. But what can we learn from decades of designing digital artifacts that have fundamentally revamped work processes across industries, allowed for the emergence of new business models, and even spurred entirely new industries? This essay is inspired by the way archaeologists make sense of the past and represent the resulting knowledge. We propose a novel approach to the analysis of digital artifacts based on the archaeological approaches to context reconstruction and artifact analysis. We explain how a design archaeologist can shift among the perspectives of designers, users, and the generated artifact to make inferences about the artifact (i.e., design artifact), how it has been designed (i.e., design process), the context in which it has been designed (i.e., the design context), and the situations in which it has been used (i.e., the use contexts).