Sociotech ID Workshop 2008

Overview

Interaction design is becoming more challenging because of advances in technology – pervasive, ubiquitous, multimodal and adaptive – are changing the nature of interaction. The aim of this workshop is to provide a forum for interaction design practitioners and specialists interested in knowledge from the social sciences to discuss how sociotechnical insights can best be used to inform interactive design and how social methods and theories can fit into changing patterns of development and participatory design. Both long papers and short papers submissions are invited, addressing key aspects of current research and practical case studies.

Rationale

Diverse areas of the social sciences explore and conceptualize the relation between people, society and technology under the rubric of ‘sociotechnical’. Organizational studies of technology adoption have a well defined conceptual framework known as sociotechnical systems theory with established principles. However, the situation is not the same for interaction design research, which gives diverse uses to the term ‘sociotechnical’ when involving social methods and theories. Methodological perspectives like ethnography, ethnomethodology and activity theory have had a clear impact in interaction design, but the potential contribution of other areas of the social sciences has not become so clear and uniform despite the increased development of the pervasive and social proxy – mediating and mediated -- characters of interactive systems.
This workshop will bring together good examples of research in interaction design that refer to the term ‘sociotechnical’. The challenge is to achieve some level of ‘translation’ despite differences between disciplines whose main interest is understanding social phenomena and disciplines whose main interest is the design of interactive systems. It is hoped the workshop will identify opportunities for a sociotechnical knowledge framework in interaction design. More info: http://iit.tvu.ac.uk/sociotech-id08 http://itcentre.tvu.ac.uk/journal for paper submission