Socio-technical Design: Combining society and technology

Technology connects people socially.  Much of our global information society is now dependent on well designed socio-technical systems, from corporate email and electronic markets to blogs and social networking sites. 

The recently published Handbook of Research on Socio-Technical Design and Social Networking Systems summarises the latest thinking on how to successfully combine our knowledge of society and technology to improve performance.

There are no easy answers to how you design socio-technical systems, and this book presents an invaluable overview of a vast and confusing field.  In my prologue to the book, summarised below, I look at how socio-technical systems have developed from being the workers’ enemy to the peoples’ friend.

In the beginning

In the nineteenth century, Karl Marx observed that the emerging industrialisation processes deprived workers of control over their lives and selves.  Growth in scientific management simply furthered this view that workers should be little more than cogs in the industrial machine.

By the middle of the twentieth century, one of the biggest concerns in the labour movement was that new technology would eliminate jobs and result in mass unemployment.  Technology was viewed as an enemy of ordinary people that could be exploited (if you were a boss) or which should be opposed (if you were a worker).

At that time, sociologists at the Tavistock Institute, building on Marx’s observations, pioneered a socio-technical approach.  This recognised that systems comprised both technical and social elements that could be developed in parallel – with benefits for productivity, quality and the well being of the workers.  This approach has turned out to be just as important for modern computer based systems as for the industrialised production systems of the past.

Some things have changed

When I look round today, I see almost everyone plugged into an i-pod, clutching a mobile phone, or hunched over a laptop.  Something has changed dramatically.  Technology is back and this time it’s personal.  Few people now believe that technology itself is the problem although it can still be used to support dehumanising systems.  Even anti-globalisation protesters use mobile phones and the internet.

We still have a long way to go

However, even as a friend, technology still needs to be kept under control.  One of the thorny issues which has survived from the earliest socio-technical work concerns how the socio and the technical aspects of the systems are designed.  Clearly there are different skills required to design social systems from those required for the technical elements.  This has sometimes resulted in a fragmentation of design teams, with some people designing technology and some dealing with ‘social’ issues like work design and change management.

There have also been efforts to involve end users in technical design, with varying degrees of success.  There is even an International Standard on Human Centred Design for Interactive Systems (ISO 13407) which I helped develop.  This standard identifies a clear role for users at all stages in systems design with a view to improving system usability.  But it does not address the wider social aspects of systems in any detail.

What’s next?

I suspect that social systems evolve rather than allow themselves to be designed, so efforts to design socio-technical systems must allow and encourage this evolution.  Perhaps the more we try to actively design the social component, the less room there is for real social systems to develop.

Technologists are notoriously bad at predicting how people will use their technology over time.  However, the more we understand that almost all systems are socio-technical, the more likelihood there is that we will be able to design and evolve systems to support real people living real lives.

This new handbook describes a wide range of views about socio-technical theory and I believe they will contribute significantly to our understanding of this complex and changing phenomenon.

You can buy a copy of the book here: Handbook of Research on Socio-Technical Design and Social Networking Systems (2-volumes) Edited By: Brian Whitworth, Massey University (Albany), Auckland, New Zealand; Aldo de Moor, CommunitySense, The Netherlands

Or if you’d like a taster, Google has extracts from the book, (including my prologue) for free.