DS:E Online Session: The Pragmatist Underpinnings of Design Science

Join us for an engaging DS:E online session on the philosophical foundations of design science, with a focus on pragmatism.

Inspired by Herbert Simon’s The Sciences of the Artificial, design science has become a powerful and increasingly influential approach in management and entrepreneurship. Yet much of the design science literature remains primarily instrumental—centered on building and testing artifacts (e.g., new management practices, organizational designs, entrepreneurship tools). As a result, the philosophical foundations of design science are often implicit, underdeveloped, or unevenly understood across the field.

In this session, Frithjof Wegener (Northumbria University) and Sjoerd Romme (TU Eindhoven) will present key ideas from their manuscript, “The pragmatist underpinnings of design science” (proposed for the Springer Handbook of Philosophy of Management).

Building on these foundations, the presentation will unpack how pragmatism frames:

• knowledge and knowing as situated and practice-based,

• the interaction of abductive, inductive, and deductive reasoning in design inquiry,