Socio-Technical Systems and Knowledge Representation

The UK National Health Service (NHS) provides the opportunity to undertake local socio-technical system design to help staff maximize the opportunities of using mobile technology whilst minimizing the impact of change to existing patient systems. A real-world example from a local NHS socio-technical system is considered, that contains a collection of mobile clinicians and technology which provides home care to patients. The success of the Mobile NHS service has a high dependency upon the social aspects of the solution and draws upon a combination of people, resources, technology and economic events. This chapter considers multiagent system architectures, to model social complexity, and capture system knowledge, and then outlines a prototyping technique as a means of implementing and testing the design model. It concludes that the practice of implementing a prototype ontology provides a valuable step in clarifying meaning and understanding of concepts at the outset.

Being Face to Face

The chapter introduces the Bourdieuean habitus and field theory as a framework for an alternative way of investigating how perceptions of Media Rich Conferencing Technologies (MRCT) such as video conferencing, Access Grid and Telepresence systems affect approaches to their design, implementation and application, and the ways in which they are utilized by end users. The habitus and field theory is utilized to provide a break-way from prevalent models of analyzing technology uptake and innovation diffusion and provides a new framework for positioning the MRCT as a social construct operating within interrelating social, economic, environmental, and technological systems. This new positioning opens the way for an alternative view of the role of MRCT and facilitates new approaches to their design.

The Challenges of Co-Design and the Case of e-Me

Setting up co-design processes involving several stakeholders is a complex task. In this chapter the authors have looked upon experiences from involving 120 future users in a process of incrementally developing and deploying an electronic assistant for students. The vision is to develop an electronic assistant, an e-Me, that acts as a filter and an agent in the information society. By interviewing some of the future users we have managed to derive some different challenges associated with co-design processes. These challenges have been discussed related to the following categories; perceived usefulness, user involvement in the development process, learning process and critical factors for future development. The authors analyze the empirical data and derive suggestions for possible improvements.

Explaining Participation in Online Communities

The last few years have seen a substantial growth in online communities such as MySpace and Facebook. In order to survive and increase in size, online community systems must enhance social interaction and participation. This chapter analyzes participation in new online communities, using a combination of the socio-technical perspective and the human-computer interaction perspective. In 2007, both qualitative and quantitative data was collected from questionnaires from five sample groups in Norway—four popular online communities and one national sample of Internet users. The results show that online communities attract like-minded people, but vary in terms of different user types. Most visitors have a clear social purpose, but the level of participation differs with respect to user types and community characteristics. Participation in terms of user-generated content (UGC) differs greatly, depending on the medium used. Most users do not contribute audio-visual UGC, and text is still the main UGC. Possible future research and socio-technical design implications are discussed.

The Social Requirements of Technical Systems

A socio-technical system (STS) is a social system built upon a technical base. An STS adds social requirements to human-computer interaction (HCI) requirements, which already add to technical (hardware and software) requirements. Socio-technical systems use technology to connect people socially, for example through e-mail, electronic markets, social network systems, knowledge exchange systems, blogs, chat rooms, and so forth. Yet while the technology is often new, the social principles of people interacting with people may not be. The requirements of successful social communities, whether mediated by computers or the physical world, may be similar. If so, socio-technical systems must close the gap between social needs and technical performance, between what communities want and what the technology does. If online society is essentially a social system, of people interacting with people, social principles rather than the mediating technology should drive its design. Societies create value through social synergy, which is lost for example when people steal from others, whether time (spam), money (scams), credibility (lying), reputation (libel) or anything else of value. The success of today’s global information society depends upon designing the architecture of online interaction to support social goals. This chapter briefly reviews some of the emerging requirements of STS design.

The Role of Affect in an Agent-Based Collaborative E-Learning System Used for Engineering Education

Affective computing is a new artificial intelligence area that deals with the possibility of making computers able to recognize human emotions in different ways. This chapter represents an implemented framework, which integrates this new area with an intelligent tutoring system. The authors argue that tutor agents providing socially appropriate affective behaviors would provide a new dimension for collaborative learning systems. The main goal is to analyse learner facial expressions and show how affective computing could contribute to learning interactions, both by recognizing learner emotions during learning sessions and by responding appropriately.

Applied Pragmatism and Interaction Design

This chapter presents a translational approach to socio-technical design, as a new approach to the theorybased design of user interfaces, supported by a multi-stage process. A survey of the early work on theorybased design in HCI identifies the strengths and limitations of this approach. This new approach extends HCI with a socio-cultural perspective, and adopts creative practices from the fields of architecture and furniture design. The process consists of three stages: selection, appropriation, and translation that “map” elements from the socio-cultural domain to the HCI domain. Two interactive systems are used to illustrate the process, informed by ideas of American pragmatism. The chapter ends by discussing the strengths and limitations of the translational approach, and points out directions for further work.

Systems Design with the Socio-Technical Walkthrough

Socio-technical systems integrate technical and organizational structures and are related to various stakeholders and their perspectives. The design of socio-technical systems has to support this integration and to take the differing perspectives into account. To support this goal, the design concepts have to be represented with appropriate documentation methods, which combine formal and informal aspects. Communication processes have to be facilitated which systematically refer to these kinds of documentation. Therefore a socio-technical, semi-structured modeling method (SeeMe) is introduced. It represents socio-technical concepts with diagrams which can be developed, evaluated and improved by the socio-technical walkthrough (STWT). This facilitation method—together with a corresponding software-tool—has proven to be suitable for socio-technical design in complex, practical projects.

Building a Path for Future Communities

With mobile technologies increasingly weaving themselves into the fabric of our communities, it would be beneficial to increase our understanding of how these devices will affect our quality of life. This chapter presents a case study where a set of prototypes of future social technology concepts were generated and used by groups of backpackers in a mobile community. One of these concepts, which facilitated viewing the locations of other group members, is evaluated with regard to how it might affect community development. This and other examples illustrate that communication technologies form a social path which guides individual and emergent behavior of societies. Determination of where these paths lead can be accomplished through the creation of development projects with positive social aims. Using collaborative research methods, considering design outcome spectra, and adding features with implicit cultural values are promising strategies for influencing future communities.

A Framework for Using Analytics to Make Decisions

Analytics provides evidence for objective corporate decision-making. Lack of understanding of analytical techniques can create confusion amongst decision-makers. Confusion generates mistrust which leads to the exclusion of analytics from the decision-making process. Confusion is avoided by ensuring that results are justified. This requires that the analytical process is auditable. Aligning technological design and deployment with human roles creates the necessary framework for auditability. This is achieved with four analytical technology components: data manipulation, statistical and quantitative analysis, creation, and export of exploratory and predictive models, and delivery of output. These components correspond with key stages and phases of collaboration in the analytical process. Describing the interaction and alignment leads to a proposed framework for the socio-technical development of analytical software and process which considers both user and non-user needs. This framework can be expanded to other domains where technology and users of technology must collaborate with non-users who dictate acceptance.