Susan Gasson - Home Page

Research Interests
My research explores how groups of people from diverse communities of practice collaborate to design information systems in organizations, with the aim of improving approaches to the co-design of business processes and information systems. I am also interested in the design of technology to support collaboration, particularly to support organizational knowledge exchange and group memory. I identify design, problem-solving, and decision-making as fundamentally the same process. My research therefore focuses on design groups faced with wicked problems -- problems that cannot be defined in terms of a solution. I conduct ethnographic and action-research studies in the co-design of business and IT systems in boundary-spanning groups, to understand how these processes function -- and how we may intervene to make organizational IT innovation more effective.

I believe passionately that the design of organizational IT systems should be easier than it is -- and that the reason that "user-centered design' is so rarely user-centered is that we lack a common language (methods, terminology, and shared deliverables) to involve users effectively in IT system design. I have written extensively on these topics (see the Publications page and also the Discussion Papers on this site).

I am the coordinator for the Social Informatics research cluster in the iSchool at Drexel. I am currently working on a 5-year NSF project to study Distributed Cooperation In Boundary-Spanning IS Design.

Teaching Specialisms
I teach courses that are concerned with critical thinking, IS analysis skills, and management of the systems development function. I also teach seminars in qualitative research and social theory.

About Me: Brief Biography and Academic Resume