Information gain in sociotechnical systems

International audienceCommunication issues persist in sociotechnical systems with functioning communication equipment, prompting researchers and practitioners alike to bemoan the absence of information sharing. Computer scientists envision a broadly accessible virtual display, but lack the principles for selecting, formatting and organizing content to make it useful. We argue that what is needed is information rather than data, and that situating data in context is key to the provision of information. Documentation of information exchange issues in real crisis management is quite superficial, generally pointing to conclusions without any supporting data. Using documentation of the Deepwater Horizon Accident in 2010, we suggest three requirements for the design of computationally supported information exchange: 1) computational support to distribute distilled information, not low-level data, 2) a computationally accessible, current plan to provide context to guide the routing of information to interested parties and 3) a means to detect and elevate newly relevant, but formerly suppressed detail

An analytic framework to assess organizational resilience

Background: Resilience Engineering is a paradigm for safety management that focuses on coping with complexity to achieve success, even considering several conflicting goals. Modern socio-technical systems have to be resilient to comply with the variability of everyday activities, the tight-coupled and underspecified nature of work and the nonlinear interactions among agents. At organizational level, resilience can be described as a combination of four cornerstones: monitoring, responding, learning and anticipating. Methods: Starting from these four categories, this paper aims at defining a semi-quantitative analytic framework to measure organizational resilience in complex socio-technical systems, combining the Resilience Analysis Grid (RAG) and the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP). Results: This paper presents an approach for defining resilience abilities of an organization, creating a structured domain-dependent framework to define a resilience profile at different levels of abstraction, to identify weaknesses and strengths of the system and thus potential actions to increase system’s adaptive capacity. An illustrative example in an anaesthesia department clarifies the outcomes of the approach. Conclusions: The outcome of the RAG, i.e. a weighted set of probing questions, can be used in different domains, as a support tool in a wider Safety-II oriented managerial action to bring safety management into the core business of the organization

A deeply embedded sociotechnical strategy for designing ICT for development

This document is the author deposited version. You are advised to consult the publisher's version if you wish to cite from it. Published version DEARDEN, Andy and RIZVI, Haider (2009). A deeply embedded sociotechnical strategy for designing ICT for development. International journal of sociotechnology and knowledge development, 1 (4), 52-70. Repository use policy Copyright © and Moral Rights for the papers on this site are retained by the individual authors and/or other copyright owners. Users may download and/or print one copy of any article(s) in SHURA to facilitate their private study or for noncommercial research. You may not engage in further distribution of the material or use it for any profit-making activities or any commercial gain. Sheffield Hallam University Research Archiv

The STIN in the Tale: A Socio-technical Interaction Perspective on Networked Learning

In this paper, we go beyond what have been described as 'mechanistic' accounts of e-learning to explore the complexity of relationships between people and technology as encountered in cases of networked learning. We introduce from the social informatics literature the concept of sociotechnical interaction networks which focus on the interplay between participants, technology, learning artefacts and practices. We apply this concept to case material drawn from transnational trade union education to identify and to analyse three aspects of networked learning: the local sociotechnical networks of learners; the construction of an overarching, global sociotechnical network for learning; and the evolution of such networks over time. Finally we identify issues for further research highlighted by these models

High-Tech Urban Agriculture in Amsterdam : An Actor Network Analysis

The agriculture and horticulture sector in the Netherlands is one of the most productive in the world. Although the sector is one of the most advanced and intense agricultural production systems worldwide, it faces challenges, such as climate change and environmental and social unsustainability of industrial production. To overcome these challenges, alternative food production initiatives have emerged, especially in large cities such as Amsterdam. Some initiatives involve producing food in the urban environment, supported by new technologies and practices, so-called high-tech urban agriculture (HTUA). These initiatives make cultivation of plants inside and on top of buildings possible and increase green spaces in urban areas. The emerging agricultural technologies are creating new business environments that are shape d by technology developers (e.g., suppliers of horticultural light emitting diodes (LED) and control environment systems) and developers of alternative food production practices (e.g., HTUA start-ups). However, research shows that the uptake of these technological innovations in urban planning processes is problematic. Therefore, this research analyzes the barriers that local government planners and HTUA developers are facing in the embedding of HTUA in urban planning processes, using the city of Amsterdam as a case study. This study draws on actor-network theory (ANT) to analyze the interactions between planners, technologies, technology developers and developers of alternative food production practices. Several concepts of ANT are integrated into a multi-level perspective on sustainability transitions (MLP) to create a new theoretical framework that can explain how interactions between technologies and planning actors transform the incumbent social\u2013technical regime. The configuration of interactions between social and material entities in technology development and adoption processes in Amsterdam is analyzed through the lens of this theoretical framework. The data in this study were gathered by tracing actors and their connections by using ethnographic research methods. In the course of the integration of new technologies into urban planning practices, gaps between technologies, technology developers, and planning actors have been identified. The results of this study show a lacking connection between planning actors and technology developers, although planning actors do interact with developers of alternative food production practices. These interactions are influenced by agency of artefacts such as visualizations of the future projects. The paper concludes that for the utilization of emerging technologies for sustainability transition of cities, the existing gap between technology developers and planning actors needs to be bridged through the integration of technology development visions in urban agendas and planning processe

Reducing energy demand: a review of issues, challenges and approaches

Most commentators expect improved energy efficiency and reduced energy demand to provide the dominant contribution to tackling global climate change. But at the global level, the correlation between increased wealth and increased energy consumption is very strong and the impact of policies to reduce energy demand is both limited and contested. Different academic disciplines approach energy demand reduction in different ways: emphasising some mechanisms and neglecting others, being more or less optimistic about the potential for reducing energy demand and providing insights that are more or less useful for policymakers. This article provides an overview of the main issues and challenges associated with energy demand reduction, summarises how this challenge is ‘framed’ by key academic disciplines, indicates how these can provide complementary insights for policymakers and argues that a ‘sociotechnical’ perspective can provide a deeper understanding of the nature of this challenge and the processes through which it can be achieved. The article integrates ideas from the natural sciences, economics, psychology, innovation studies and sociology but does not give equal weight to each. It argues that reducing energy demand will prove more difficult than is commonly assumed and current approaches will be insufficient to deliver the transformation required

Collaborative memory knowledge: A distributed reliabilist perspective

Collaborative remembering, in which two or more individuals cooperate to remember together, is an ordinary occurrence. Ordinary though it may be, it challenges traditional understandings of remembering as a cognitive process unfolding within a single subject, as well as traditional understandings of memory knowledge as a justified memory belief held within the mind of a single subject. Collaborative memory has come to be a major area of research in psychology, but it has so far not been investigated in epistemology. In this chapter, we attempt an initial exploration of the epistemological implications of collaborative memory research, taking as our starting point the “extended knowledge” debate which has resulted from the recent encounter between extracranialist theories of cognition and externalist theories of knowledge (Carter et al., 2014; Carter et al., forthcoming). Various forms of socially and technologically augmented memory have played important roles in the extended knowledge debate, but the debate has so far not taken collaborative memory, in particular, into account. We will argue that collaborative memory supports a novel externalist theory of knowledge: distributed reliabilism. Distributed reliabilism departs in two important respects from both traditional reliabilism (Goldman, 2012) and updated theories such as extended (Goldberg, 2010) and social reliabilism (Goldman, 2014). First, it acknowledges that belief-forming processes may extend extracranially to include processing performed both by other subjects and by technological artifacts. Second, it acknowledges that distributed sociotechnical systems themselves may be knowing subjects. Overall, then, the main aim of the chapter is to draw out the philosophical implications of psychological research on collaborative memory. But our argument will also suggest that it may be useful to broaden the standard conception of collaborative memory to include not only the sorts of direct interactions among subjects that have been the focus of psychological research so far but also a range of more indirect, technology-supported and -mediated interactions, and it thus has implications for psychology as well