University of Siegen

Faculty Member, Department of Business Administration, Business Informatics and Business Law

Assistent Professor

About

Gunnar Stevens is Assistent Professor in the Department of Management Information Systems, University of Siegen, Germany. He has a CSCW identity with a background in computer science and mathematical logic, but with a strong affinity to design, sociology and analytic philosophy.

His special interest on art and science is going back to his time in school. Yet in the last years, his relation to humanities has grown also because of the inspiring cooperation with the Siegener media scientist working together in the SfB/FK 613 Medienumbrüche.

During his time at the Fraunhofer FIT, he headed a research project on component based End User Development (CoEUD) and co-developed the Business Ethnography (BE) approach. In his recent work he further elaborates the ideas of BE by the concept of Grounded Design as a more research-through-design approach. In this methodological reflection, he challenges the topic, how to conduct explorative design research and legitimize design intervention into social practices.
In particular, he wants to figure out what is the common ground between design and ethnographical work and where is the difference between the fieldwork for design and the designer in the field. In searching an answer, he becomes interested in performance theory. Further as a part of finishing his PhD he becomes a specialist in Pragmatism and Peirce semiotic as a dialectical logic of cognition and action.

At the moment, he applies the theoretic-methodological framework of Grounded Design in various fields of application.
He is works with the things group to understand and support the navigation practices of firefighters and investigating into new strategies to design context-aware systems. As he has not the lively experience going through the fire (like the others of the things group) his role is mainly the kind of an external supervisor in order to critical reflect the own work and the emerging of experiences.

Another area trying out the Grounded Design idea is the joined research activities on Sustainable Interaction Design and SmartMetering carrying out at the Siegen University and Fraunhofer FIT. In this area, he wants to understand the residential energy practices from within the dwellers.

Last but not least, he researched on his PhD theme on End User Development and Appropriation Infrastructures. With regard to this, he is quite curious about to study the effects on it diffusion of work practices, if social software features are integrated into the use context. A first impression what this means in terms of design is given by the Peereclipse plugged into Eclipse working environments

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