Socio-Technical Systems Design for Public Interest Technologies

Session Type: Scientific Session

Session Description: Society is in the midst of a digital transformation that has as its main goal operational effectiveness. Top-down approaches continue to characterize the design, development and deployment of new, advanced socio-technical systems. However, the design of these complex socio-technical systems requires a shift in thinking from a "build and they will come”, technology-centric approach to one that is inclusive of the citizen, their cultural context, local knowledge, lived experience and professional expertise. This requires socio-technical design methodologies that allow for fundamental principles to be articulated, conceptualised and operationalized through collaborative approaches to design. Notably, through a process of co-design, socio-technical systems can emerge that respond to the needs of the community at large. In this panel, we demonstrate an emergent paradigm that embraces the value of democracy-by-design through socio-technical design for public interest technology, presenting an evidence-based example of an operationalised socio-technical system in practice. This enhanced design methodology ensures a better distribution of finite resources, allowing us to build sustainable socio-technical systems. The contribution of the panel is in tracing the steps from defining principles to enacting change through a process of co-design, resulting in operationalized socio-technical systems that serve the public interest through an emphasis on values.

Categories:

1. Engineering, Industry, and Technology

2. Sustainability and Resource Management

3. Public Policy

Section Member Affiliation: SOCIETAL IMPACTS OF SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING

Relevance to Theme or Special Relevance to the Audience:

This presentation directly addresses four areas of the conference theme for 2022:evidence-based, trust in systems, public interest technology; and scenario-based planning that drives public policy. The first is in the use of evidence-based decision making in the design process itself. By incorporating systems that capture the voices of the people, power is returned to them, as their hopes and statements remain documented and open for the public to scrutinize using secure platforms and anonymized identities. Second, we emphasise the need for trust through open systems development. If an organization or group of designers can prove how they transferred a mental model into documentation, and then used that documentation to draw out needs, identify values and set opportunities, all the way to service provisioning, then we have the ability to configure socio-technical systems in a way that benefits all who have been engaged, and the communities of interest they represent. Fundamentally, when we talk of public interest technology, our third relationship to the conference, we are referring to the demonstrated ability to go from principles, to ethics, to values (e.g. democracy), to process to design, to regulation and more. There remains a traceable route by which to iterate as communities change their composition, becoming more agile at addressing the needs around them. Finally, this enhanced form of socio-technical systems design allows for the anticipation of unanticipated and unintended consequences that can be addressed by interventions if they play out in the real world.

Newsworthiness:

Good design remains an enigmatic activity. Large information and communication technology civic projects still fail because they are not adopted by the users they are built for or because they plainly just do not work as they are meant. Socio-technical co-design emphasis the need to build with stakeholders, and not for stakeholders. One reason ICT failure is prevalent post the development process is that they do not include the end-user in the development process from the outset. This is not a new phenomenon, we have known for decades that good systems are inclusive of their end-users, have gathered requirements through in-depth participative interviews and continue to engage the end-user right through to the evaluation stage of a fully functional system, and beyond. Since the 2000s with the introduction of advanced information and communication technologies, complexity in systems design has grown through the introduction of cloud computing, mobile solutions, IOT, facial recognition and more recently smart city systems. Interactions between stakeholders is also more meshed and global than ever before, as digital products and services are sourced from all over the world and a variety of large and small providers, and combined (and re-combined) to offer a real-time solution. However, design for the greater part, is still treated like a top-down process, only relevant to the innovators, and often few others, if anyone else. Socio-technical design has always respected the multi-dimensional flows between social, technical and environmental subsystems in an attempt to better configure services for the community at large. And this panel demonstrates the potential of a new way of thinking as we rapidly undergo a digital transformation. This work builds on studies over the last 70 years when systems thinking was first prevalent in operations research. It is a call for corporations and public agencies to heed the warnings that were delivered by our earliest systems pioneers that transdisciplinarity was paramount to the design effort. This kind of shift in theory and practice has the potential to change people's lives and workplaces, if we consider new methods and tools, for engaging the public, incorporating diverse voices from diverse stakeholders, and providing evidence of consultation.

Sections:

INFORMATION, COMPUTING, AND COMMUNICATION

SOCIAL, ECONOMIC, AND POLITICAL SCIENCES

SOCIETAL IMPACTS OF SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING

keywords: innovation, science and values and sustainability science

Speaker 1: Roba Abbas, Lecturer, Dr.; University of Wollongong

Title: Complex Socio-Technical Systems Design: From Theory to Operationalization

Talk Description: This presentation will provide an overview of an enhanced approach to socio-technical systems design in an open and complex environment, exploring the principles of socio-technical design through to their operationalization and the significance of professionalization to the design process.

Speaker 2: Katina Michael, Professor, Dr.; Arizona State University

Title: Leading with Evidence: Operationalizing Public Interest Technology in Practice

Talk Description: This presentation will feature a real-world example of principles to process to proof in the development of Public Interest Technology, through the identification of community values, and the end-to-end operationalization of these using open cooperative platforms for the empowerment of communities.

Speaker 3: Jeremy Pitt, Professor, Dr.; Imperial College London

Title: Building Sustainable Socio-Technical Systems: Democracy-by-Design

Talk Description: This presentation will build on value-sensitive design by introducing "democracy" as a fundamental value in the design process. Elinor Ostrom's resource pooling work will be used to demonstrate the importance of building sustainable systems.

Citation: Rob Nicholls (Moderator), Roba Abbas (Organiser, Speaker), Katina Michael (Co-Organiser, Speaker), Jeremy Pitt (Speaker), “Socio-Technical Systems Design for Public Interest Technologies”, 17-20 February 2022, Philadelphia USA, https://meetings.aaas.org/