The Social Design Of Technical Systems

Download or read book The Social Design of Technical Systems written by Brian Whitworth and published by . This book was released on 2014-05-01 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hundreds of millions of people use social technologies like Wikipedia, Facebook and YouTube every day, but what makes them work? And what is the next step? The Social Design of Technical Systems explores the path from computing revolution to social evolution. Based on the assumption that it is essential to consider social as well as technological requirements, as we move to create the systems of the future, this book explores the ways in which technology fits, or fails to fit, into the social reality of the modern world. Important performance criteria for social systems, such as fairness, synergy, transparency, order and freedom, are clearly explained for the first time from within a comprehensive systems framework, making this book invaluable for anyone interested in socio-technical systems, especially those planning to build social software. This book reveals the social dilemmas that destroy communities, exposes the myth that computers are smart, analyses social errors like the credit meltdown, proposes online rights standards and suggests community-based business models. If you believe that our future depends on merging social virtue and technology power, you should read this book.

Download or read book Handbook of Research on Socio-Technical Design and Social Networking Systems written by Whitworth, Brian and published by IGI Global. This book was released on 2009-03-31 with total page 964 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Addresses current issues of research into socio-technical systems (STSs). Provides suggestions on how social knowledge can synergize with technical knowledge.

Download or read book Social Science, Technical Systems, and Cooperative Work written by Geoffrey Bowker and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 2014-05-12 with total page 495 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is the first to directly address the question of how to bridge what has been termed the "great divide" between the approaches of systems developers and those of social scientists to computer supported cooperative work--a question that has been vigorously debated in the systems development literature. Traditionally, developers have been trained in formal methods and oriented to engineering and formal theoretical problems; many social scientists in the CSCW field come from humanistic traditions in which results are reported in a narrative mode. In spite of their differences in style, the two groups have been cooperating more and more in the last decade, as the "people problems" associated with computing become increasingly evident to everyone. The authors have been encouraged to examine, rigorously and in depth, the theoretical basis of CSCW. With contributions from field leaders in the United Kingdom, France, Scandinavia, Mexico, and the United States, this volume offers an exciting overview of the cutting edge of research and theory. It constitutes a solid foundation for the rapidly coalescing field of social informatics. Divided into three parts, this volume covers social theory, design theory, and the sociotechnical system with respect to CSCW. The first set of chapters looks at ways of rethinking basic social categories with the development of distributed collaborative computing technology--concepts of the group, technology, information, user, and text. The next section concentrates more on the lessons that can be learned at the design stage given that one wants to build a CSCW system incorporating these insights--what kind of work does one need to do and how is understanding of design affected? The final part looks at the integration of social and technical in the operation of working sociotechnical systems. Collectively the contributors make the argument that the social and technical are irremediably linked in practice and so the "great divide" not only should be a thing of the past, it should never have existed in the first place.

Download or read book Theory of Technical Systems written by Vladimir Hubka and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents a comprehensive and unifying theory to promote the under standing of technical systems. Such a theory is useful as a foundation for a ratio nal approach to the engineering design process, as a background to engineering education, and other applications. The term "technical system" is used to represent all types of man-made artifacts, including technical products and processes. The technical system is therefore the subject (in the grammatical sense of the word) of the collection of activities which are performed by engineers within the processes of engineering design, including generating, retrieving, processing and transmitting of information about products. It is also the subject of various tasks in the production process, including work preparation and production planning, and in many economic considerations, company-internal and societal. In this way, the Theory of Technical Systems is a contribution to science, as in terpreted in the wider, Germanic sense of a "co-ordinated and codified body of knowledge". It brings together the various viewpoints of engineers, scientists, economists, ergonomists, managers, users, sociologists, etc., and shows where and how they influence the forms of engineering products. It also explains the influ ences that a product exerts on its environment. This Theory of Technical Systems should thus interest design engineers, and en gineers involved in production, management, sales, etc. In an interdisciplinary ap plication of value analysis, the Theory of Technical Systems should provide answers to many questions raised in this field.

Download or read book Handbook on Resilience of Socio-Technical Systems written by Matthias Ruth and published by Edward Elgar Publishing. This book was released on 2019 with total page 429 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The goal to improve the resilience of social systems – communities and their economies – is increasingly adopted by decision makers. This unique and comprehensive Handbook focuses on the interdependencies of these social systems and the technologies that support them. Special attention is given to the ways in which resilience is conceptualized by different disciplines, how resilience may be assessed, and how resilience strategies are implemented. Case illustrations are presented throughout to aid understanding.

Download or read book Design for Sustainability (Open Access) written by Fabrizio Ceschin and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-08-21 with total page 213 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book discusses the most significant ways in which design has been applied to sustainability challenges using an evolutionary perspective. It puts forward an innovation framework that is capable of coherently integrating multiple design for sustainability (DfS) approaches developed so far. It is now widely understood that design can and must play a crucial role in the societal transformations towards sustainability. Design can in fact act as a catalyst to trigger and support innovation, and can help to shape the world at different levels: from materials to products, product–service systems, social organisations and socio-technical systems. This book offers a unique perspective on how DfS has evolved in the past decades across these innovation levels, and provides insights on its promising and necessary future development directions. For design scholars, this book will trigger and feed the academic debate on the evolution of DfS and its next research frontiers. For design educators, the book can be used as a supporting tool to design courses and programmes on DfS. For bachelor’s and master’s level design, engineering and management students, the book can be a general resource to provide an understanding of the historical evolution of DfS. For design practitioners and businesses, the book offers a rich set of practical examples, design methods and tools to apply the various DfS approaches in practice, and an innovation framework which can be used as a tool to support change in organisations that aim to integrate DfS in their strategy and processes.

Download or read book The Social Engagement of Social Science, Volume 2 written by Eric Trist and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 1990 with total page 709 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: World War II brought together a group of psychiatrists and clinical and social psychologists in the British Army where they developed radical, action-oriented innovations in social psychiatry. They became known as the "Tavistock Group" since the core members had been at the pre-war Tavistock Clinic. They created the post-war Tavistock Institute of Human Relations and expanded on their wartime achievements by pioneering a new mode of relating theory and practice, called in these volumes, "The Social Engagement of Social Science." There are three perspectives: the socio-psychological, the socio-technical, and the socio-ecological. These perspectives are interdependent, yet each has its own focus and is represented in a separate volume. The Institute's dynamic social science approach to industrial problems, presented in this second volume, began with Eric Trist's coal-mining program for the development of more productive and personally satisfying self-regulating forms of work organization. The whole "Quality of Life" movement owes its theoretical and empirical basis to this pathfinding endeavor. Volume I, The Socio-Psychological Perspective, extended the object-relations approach in psychoanalysis to group, organizational, and wider social life. This extension is related to field theory, the personality/culture approach, and open systems theory. Action-oriented papers deal with key ideas in social psychiatry, varieties of group process, new paths in family studies, the dynamics of organizational change, and the unconscious in culture and society. Volume III will focus on non-hierarchical forms of organization facilitating inter-organizational relations in complex and rapidly changing environments—the socio-ecological perspective. This perspective is offered as a guide to institution building for the future.