SI aim to ensure that technical research agendas and system
designs are relevant to people's lives. The keyword is relevance, ensuring that
technical work is socially-driven rather than technology-driven. Relevance has two
dimensions: process and substance.
Design and implementation processes need to be
relevant to the actual social dynamics of a given site of social practice, and the
substance of design and implementation (the actual designs, the actual systems) need
to be relevant to the lives of the people they affect.
SI sets agendas for all the
technical work in two ways:
1) more superficially, by drawing attention to
functionalities that people value, thus setting priorities for design and
implementation
2) more fundamentally, by articulating those analytical
categories that have been found useful in describing social reality, and that which
therefore should also define technical work in/for that reality as well.
Unfortunately,
many technical professionals have viewed social concerns as peripheral.
One key
role of SI is to stand things back on their feet, so that social concerns are central and
define the ground that technical work stands on. Professional systems designer oriented to social
informatics could design a new system. A systems designer with a socio-technical
orientation does not simply consider these elements while working in a 'design
studio' far away from the people who will use a specific system. Effectively
On Similarities and Differences between Social Informatics and Information Systems
designing socio-technical systems also requires upon a set of 'discovery processes'
to help the designers understand which features and tradeoffs will most appeal to the
people who are most likely to use the system.
There are a number of discovery
processes for learning about the preferences of the men and women who are likely to
use these systems. These discovery processes include workplace ethnography, focus
group, user participation in design teams, and participatory design strategies. These
approaches differ in many significant ways, such as the contextual richness of the
understandings that they reveal and the extent to which they give the people who will
use systems influence and power in their design.
These issues are the subject of a
lively body of research that overlaps social informatics.As we develop more elaborate ICTs and try to use them
in almost every sphere of social life, we face fresh theoretical challenges for social
informatics.
Its possibilities and value are illustrated by some of key ideas:
1) the
social shaping of ICTs,
2) the conceptions of highly intertwined socio-technical
networks,
3) roles of social incentives in energizing new electronic media, and
4) the
conceptualization of ICT infrastructure as socio-technical practices and resources.
First, to set the groundwork for socio-technical networks, start with a more general concept, that ICT, in practice, is socially shaped. In the standard
(non-social informatics) accounts of ICT and social change, it is common to hear
information technologies characterized as tools, and questions are asked about their
social impacts. To take a wider perspective, the combination of equipment, people,
governance structures, and ICT policies is called "the local computing package".
Secondly, the local computing package is also an example of a socio-technical
network. A socio-technical network brings together equipment, equipment vendors,
technical specialists, upper-level managers, ICT policies, internal funding, and
external grant funding with the people who will use information systems in the
course of other work (such as policing, accounting, taxing or planning).
These elements are not simply a static list but are interrelated within a matrix
of social and technical dependencies.
Thirdly, one key idea of social informatics research is that the social context of
information technology development and use plays a significant role in influencing
the ways in which people use information and technologies and thus affects the
consequences of the technology for work, organizations, and other social
relationships. Social context can be characterized by particular incentive systems for
using, organizing and sharing information in different work groups and work roles.
Finally, workable computer applications are usually supported by a strong sociotechnical infrastructure. The surface features of computer systems are
the most visible and are the primary subject of debates and systems analyses. But
they are only one part of computerization projects. Many key parts of information
systems are neither immediately visible nor interesting in their novelty. They include
technical infrastructure such as reliable electricity. They also involve a range of
skilled support - from people to documents system features and training people to
use them, to rapid-response consultants who can diagnose and repair system failures.
