The choice of techniques to support system design is important in order to achieve a satisfactory result with regard to the quality of the future system. In the IDEnet development project, we chose to work with techniques used within, or inspired by, three different research areas: sociology, participatory design and human-computer interaction. This paper discusses the use of one technique from each of these research areas in the development of an intranet (IDEnet) from `scratch to sketch' at the Department of Computer Science and Business Administration (IDE) in the University College of Karlskrona/Ronneby in Sweden. The advantages and disadvantages for the use of each technique for system design are also discussed