Toward Architecture-Driven Interdisciplinary Research: Learnings from a Case Study of COVID-19 Contact Tracing Apps

This paper explores the use of an architectural perspective to study complex data ecosystems and to facilitate a normative discourse on such ecosystems. It argues that an architectural perspective is helpful to bridging discursive and methodological gaps between information systems (IS) research and legal studies. Combining architectural and normative perspectives is a novel interdisciplinary research approach that provides a framework for analyzing techno-legal contexts. The merits and challenges of this approach are demonstrated and discussed in this paper using the example of COVID-19 contact tracing apps. We conceptualize our results on three levels of knowledge: the first is the actual knowledge of the exemplary contact tracing app we studied and its ecosystem; the second is knowledge of the architectural meta-model that we used, its benefits and its shortcomings; and the third is knowledge of the interdisciplinary research process of acquiring common knowledge shared by IS scholars and legal experts.