Our paper has significance in that, despite recent attention having been paid to the artifactual nature of IS and IT, the term ‘artifact’ has been used with little reflection and without differentiating among various types of artifacts. That is, there has been relatively little attention paid to the ontology of IS/IT artifacts. Our paper provides a unifying perspective on ideas that have originated in quite different paradigms, but can be recognised in different forms across many fields. The perspective that brings all these ideas together is the recognition that they all deal with different aspects of change, or mutability, which is a distinguishing characteristic of systems, living creatures and semizoic IS/IT artifacts, and all have parallels in ideas for design of IS/IT.

The paper has further significance in the implications for design theorising for semizoic artifacts. Our analysis suggests that:

Many of the ideas in this paper are not new. A number of existing approaches recognise that information systems are dynamic and can exhibit emergent behaviour (eg. Orlikowski and Gash, 1994). This prior work, however, tends to stop at the stage of analysing and describing some aspects of the behaviour of these systems: it does not go on to show how designers can explicitly confront and manage mutability through a variety of means, as we have tried to do here.

The above analysis is the first attempt to analyse information systems and information technology as semizoic artifacts. Obviously it can be deepened in many details. One aspect, not addressed in this paper is that semizoic IS/IT artifacts have the potential to modify, transform, or constrain their sur­rounding environment. They can also be thought of as actors that cause or bring about change, and their success may depend on the extent to which they are able to serve in this role. To illustrate, the success of a Knowledge Repository System for a certain domain (topic) may depend on to the extent to which the system is able to stimulate the domain experts to contribute to the knowledge repository. If an expert finds the existing knowledge in the domain and the debate related to its validity is stimulating and rewarding, he or she may be more motivated to contribute (as with scientific debate and progress). Relevant here is actor-network the­ory, which is a high-level meta-theory that views non-human entities as actors (Law, 1992). Another high-level meta-theory that deals with the interaction between actions, whether or not of human origin, and structure (environment) is structuration theory (Giddens, 1984).

Further, Heidegger (1993) was concerned that modern technology, as opposed to previous technolo­gies, modifies and challenges the natural order. It controls and reorders the natural order rather than simply using it. Heidegger uses the comparison between a windmill, which harnesses the wind but doesn’t change it, and a hydro-electric dam, which captures and changes the river. The objects within the natural order are modified to become a standing reserve for technology. The water of the river becomes the power source for hydro-electric power generation. The way in which these objects are perceived is framed with a different perspective provided by modern technology. Heidegger saw the ‘enframing’ (ge-stell) offered by modern technology and its capacity to overwhelm and restrict all other ways of re­vealing as the essence and danger of modern technology. Heidegger’s concerns were expressed before computer technology was much in evidence but they could be expected to hold with even more force given the increasing pervasiveness of IS/IT artifacts. Heidegger offers some possibility of a counterbal­ance to the pessimistic outlook of enframing through poiesis. However, different meanings are given to this concept in Heidegger’s own writing and it is almost impossible to represent it clearly, especially in a limited space as here. Nevertheless, a simplistic attempt to do so might run along the lines that humankind can perhaps escape from the technical order through thinking and poetry (poiesis), which provide a different manner of revealing from that of technology.

A further challenge is to consider how we design for emergence. The coupling of ideas between what can be observed with existing emergent systems such as the Web, and ideas from the field of complex and dy­namic systems may be worthwhile.

To conclude, we present the idea that regarding IS/IT artifacts as semizoa and dealing with their forms of mutability provides real prospects for the development of ‘grand theories’ of information systems that we would like to achieve. Some existing design theories that consider aspects of mutability have been influential, in­cluding Codd’s relational database design theory, structured systems analysis and design theories, concepts of situated action, and object-oriented approaches. However, unlike prior work we have brought together a range of different forms of mutability, showing how they differ and how they can all be used in design work. We believe that building design theories that explicitly deal with the mutability of de­signed semizoic artifacts provides a means of differentiating IS and allied fields from other design disciplines and can give our discipline a more readily identifiable theoretical base.