In my licentiate thesis, I show that it is difficult to design innovative IT since technology is part of shaping meanings and identities. When the IT design is changed, meanings and identities often change too, which restricts what is possible to design or not. If the new design deviates too much from prevailing understandings, it is often considered impossible.
This shows how existing meanings, identities and understandings, which are produced through historical, social and material practices, limit the possibilities of designing innovative IT.
In my ongoing research for my PhD, I use the knowledge developed in my licentiate thesis to study how IT innovations can be supported and nurtured. I conduct qualitative case studies in the Swedish public sector and use a sociomaterial perspective, focusing on Barad’s agential realism, to understand and explain how material-discursive practices make some IT designs possible and others impossible.
