Applying Action Design Research to Digital Social Innovation: A Case of Automated Flood Detection System in Rural Region

Abstract

Digital Social Innovation (DSI) is an action-oriented initiative aiming to tackle social challenges by introducing digital technologies. However, the extant literature tends to focus on the technological output of innovation and less on the methodological domain, particularly regarding the in-depth engagement with the social context, which hinders the construction of emergent social knowledge. This study presents a showcase of how Action Design Research (ADR) can be a promising methodological endeavor to a digital social innovation project. Based on a DSI project on the development of an automated flood detection system in a rural village in Indonesia, we show how innovation can be enacted as a collaborative and reflective process between the innovators and the community, which further enables us to formalize an understanding of the social context in innovation. This study elaborates the methodological guidelines to DSI while also reveals the contextual differences inherent to bottom-level development of a nation, in which formal and informal social actors at the village level both take the same role in assisting national endeavor toward development.