Socio Technical Systems (STS) Design

World UXUI Design Summit 2015Vikram Rao | UX Practice Head, eMids Technologies

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Agenda

• What are Socio Technical Systems? • A peek into history• Socio Technical System Stack • Contemporary Socio Technical System • Socio Technical System and User Centered Design• Why Socio Technical System Approach? • Designing Socio Technical Systems • Socio Technical System in Action… • Challenges of Socio Technical Systems

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Sociological Impact on Technology

“... technologists cannot simply leave the social and ethical questions to other people, because the technology directly

affects these matters”~ Berners-Lee

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What are Socio Technical Systems (STS)?

• Socio technical systems (STS) are:• systems that include technical systems but also

operational processes and people who use and interact with the technical system.

• a holistic approach to the design of engineering projects.

Modern day definition: A socio-technical system (STS) is a social system operating on a technical base, e.g. email, chat, bulletin boards, blogs, Wikipedia, E-Bay, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube.

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A simple example…

Ved is a back end web developer (he eats data bases for breakfast and spends his days

crunching code).

• Take Ved and Vrinda, they are both web specialists and they both work on a website.

Interact closely

• Every few months the site needs updating and Ved works hard behind the scenes coding away, he then hands the project over for Vrinda to work her magic on (or vice versa as is the case in a typical user centered process these days).

Vrinda is a front end web designer (she makes words sing and graphics come alive in simple and user-friendly interfaces that people love).

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A simple example…• This works fine initially but as the site grows with more employees being

taken on, it becomes a little less straight forward.

• We soon have multiple people working on increasingly specialized areas of the website with developers and designer often needing to interact and collaborate but finding them self's stuck in their separate departments.

• Ved and Vrinda's site now requires a more holistic and non-linear approach to overcome this stumbling block as it has now become what we can call a complex socio technical system.

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Summarizing

• Firstly STS is complex in that it has multiple elements such as lines of code, databases, graphics and so on, with all of these different things needing to interact and being dependent on each others functioning.

• And secondly it is socio technical as it represents an interaction between the technical domains of computer software and the human interaction.

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A peek into history

• The term socio technical systems was originally coined by Emery and Trist (1960) to describe systems that involve a complex interaction between humans, machines and the environmental aspects of the work system.

• Initial focus was directed at the design of work systems in factories and offices, and initially focused on traditional non-computing manufacturing systems

• The general aim was to investigate the organization of work and to see whether it could be made more humanistic, incorporating aspects such as the quality of working life.

• By the 1970’s, the design and introduction of computing systems as STS for use in organizational settings had begun.

• Period between 1980 – 90’s: Key terms used to denote this proposition include user involvement, participatory design, user satisfaction, human relations, and for the political dimension, workplace democracy.

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Socio Technical Systems Stack

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Contemporary Socio Technical Systems Design• While the STS design movement has been a source of inspiration for many students and

designers of contemporary information systems that embody human-computer interaction, the concepts and practices for socio-technical design have evolved.

• Historically, STS design seemed predicated on the percept that an IS can somehow be designed to be correct, consistent, and complete prior to its implementation, deployment and use. Instead, it has become evermore clear from a variety of studies and sources that IS development is incremental, iterative, and ongoing when situated within a complex organizational setting.

• The classic prescription for user involvement in participatory design says little about which users, user representatives, or customers are chosen in practice to participate in a system design effort.

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Socio Technical System Design vs. User Centered Design • HCI researchers have clearly been influenced by socio technical

ideas. They have been instrumental in filling in some of the gaps.

• Legacy STS design was prescriptive, but contemporary scholars of human-computer interaction prefer empirically grounded studies with descriptive results or proactive “action research” agenda, and thus work towards development of an STS design practice that builds on such grounds.

• STS looks at the various stakeholders and societal needs at large, while UCD looks at an individual (end user’s) or group of individuals’ needs

• STS is more holistic and looks at the integration and interaction between the various sub systems, while UCD would typically cover individual subsystems and their functioning

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Consequences of not considering the socio technical systems approach

• Filters help on a personal level but transmitted spam as a system problem has never stopped growing.

• While inbox spam is constant, due to filters, transmitted spam grew from 20% to 40% in 2002-2003, to 60-70% in 2004, to from 86.2% to 86.7% of the 342 billion emails sent in 2006, to 87.7% of spam in 2009 and 89.1% in 2010.

• Filters address spam as a user problem, but it is really a community problem. Transmitted spam uses Internet processing, bandwidth and storage whether users behind their filter walls see it or not.

• Pure technical design gives a socio-technical gap between what technology supports and what people want.

e.g. Designing email to let anyone message anyone without permission gave the spam problem.

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Why Socio Technical System Approach? • Many people now acknowledge that systems which are

developed using a socio-technical approach are more likely to be acceptable to end users and to deliver real value to stakeholders.

• Socio technical approaches can help the design of organisational structures and business processes as well as technical systems.

• There is a need to consider the ways that the social and technical aspects are interdependent and interact, which is central to the performance and behaviour of STSs.

Very relevant today in Healthcare organizations: Healthcare organizations are very well suited for applying STS designs. The functioning of hospitals mainly depends on the capabilities of its staff and employees. Today most hospitals still use a "Scientific Management" approach in structuring their organization, which can easlly be seen is one of the causes of the unsatisfactory functioning of hospitals. Applying STS design principles can improve that significantly.

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Designing keeping the various communities and their needs in mind!

We need to increase our service .. And decrease our cost!

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We need to assure patient assistance

and support…

!… we should improve

our algorithms and infrastructures to recognize events,

situations, activities….

Family, support, care… human

contact…

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Socio Technical System in Action…

Monitoring System

Alerting System

Reporting System

The unattended patient is leaving the room…

The caretaker gets a mobile alert (via the sensor in the door).

The patient has a fall before the attender can act (camera catches it)!

The closest nursing care unit is notified.

The treating doctor is also sent an alert.

The patient’s kin is also informed of the fall.

The patient undergoes treatment and nursing care.

The report is automatically generated based on the data.

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Impeding research question!

Is technology, organizations and users ready for such systems?

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Challenges of Socio Technical Systems

• The core problem is not technological • Difficulty in obtaining SMEs for the various sub systems of a STS and

understand how they interact with each other• Understand the central role of People • Identify real needs and integrate them into the design. • Users must easily push their preferences into the system execution.

• Research Opportunities are limited• In a typical STS, observation and contextual inquiry only yield the best results.• Its not always possible to obtain information about the environment and its

impact early on. • Law and Society • Law compliance: effects of existing laws and new laws trying to regulate this

new reality. • Adaptability to the evolution of user’s needs and organization changes.

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Designing STS - Considerations

• STS design and development process requires systematic approach to considering: • How STS issues affect the system requirement, use and evolution • Understanding people in the context where they live and work • Balance users needs with business goals, social values and technological

capabilities • People should be involved in designing the relationships between technology

and work

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Designing STS – Employing ‘Systems Thinking’

• Systems Thinking - is the process of understanding how things, regarded as systems, influence or are interdependent on one another within a whole. • Eg. In nature, systems thinking examples include

ecosystems in which various elements such as air, water, movement, plants, and animals work together to survive or perish.

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References

• Socio-technical systems: From design methods to systems engineering by Gordon Baxter and Ian Sommerville.

• Socio-Technical Design by Walt Scacchi, Institute for Software Research.• Smart socio-technical design in healthcare organizations by Glenn Robert and Jim

Zazzali.

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Vikram Rao | vikram.mohan.rao@gmail.com | +91 9845694979