Embracing the Institutional Complexity of Design Outcomes with Democratic Characteristics

The Covid-19 pandemic has impacted our societies with unprecedented magnitude. Various social rules and technological solutions have been designed to limit the spread of the virus. We have seen that governments have chosen very different approaches in utilizing mobile tracking software products to control the pandemic. By utilizing fuzzy set qualitative analysis, we investigate the interplay of institutional conditions in 48 case countries, and the design outcome. We focus especially on democratic and autocratic characteristics of design outcomes. This study’s contribution to the design research is two-fold. First, we advance the theorization on institutional conditions influencing design outcomes. Second, we demonstrate how qualitative comparative analysis can provide a rigorous method to analyze medium N case studies in design research.