Designing for Digital Transformation in a Society of Smartness: Conceptual Cornerstones, Design Implications, and a Road Ahead

Information system (IS) researchers can be seen as key change agents in occasioning positive societal change and playing a role in responding to “grand challenges”. In this monograph, we work with and advance literature about digital transformation (DT) towards how IS research can conceptualize and grapple with the design of IS artifacts for responding to such complex issues. We conceptualize DT as transformations of smart service systems (SSSs) due to the widespread use of smart technologies by individuals. We then further develop this literature toward a more sociological understanding of the practices within which individuals interact with smart technologies in their everyday lives. Based on providing these cornerstones, we move toward deriving specific suggestions for IS design of DT at a societal scale and, in doing so, contribute to research about DT, SSS, and IS design, respectively.