Embedding New IT Artifacts into Design Practice for Knowledge Creation

Designers create knowledge through interaction with artifacts in their environment. Information systems literature addresses how IT artifacts are embedded in practice, and how new IT artifacts are accepted and adapted. However, there is little attention to the processes that enable new IT artifacts to become embedded in practice when existing IT artifacts are already entrenched in design activity. Knowledge-creating design practice involves intimate cognitive relationships between designers and artifacts, and it is no trivial task to migrate invested knowledge from existing artifacts that are embedded in practice to new artifacts which take time to master in order to create knowledge. Using an in-depth case study of Frank Gehry, a world-renown and radically innovative architect, we illustrate four phenomena associated with the embedding of a new, fundamentally more complex computer-aided design system into the practice of designers: (1) motivating the new artifact; (2) anchoring the new artifact in the old; (3) building trust in the new artifact; (4) unlearning past practices