When Digital Tools Enter the Playground: Designing Information Systems for IT-Distant Care Contexts
Abstract
Information systems increasingly enter care-centered domains with limited digital infrastructure. Design approaches rooted in office-like settings often presume stable users and uninterrupted interaction; in IT-distant contexts, these premises misfit practice. We report a multi-year design science research project in a German all-day school that designed digital support for attendance documentation and coordination of children’s whereabouts. Across four iterative design cycles, we built and refined a socio-technical ecosystem. The findings highlight three interrelated challenges shaping design trade-offs: (1) stakeholder heterogeneity across staff, administration, children, and parents with divergent capabilities and accountabilities; (2) temporally fragmented and spatially distributed work that constrains attention for structured digital interaction; and (3) legitimacy- and trust-sensitive dynamics in which privacy and “surveillance” framings weigh as heavily as functional requirements. We develop a sociomaterial explanation of how artifacts become viable through multi-stakeholder alignment and derive implications for design science research in care-oriented environments.
Keywords
T-distant context; Heterogeneous user; In-situ evaluation; Socio-technical ecosystem