The Social Design of Technical Systems: Building technologies for communities Brian Whitworth with Adnan Ahmad Publisher: The Interaction Design Foundation Edition number: 1 ISBN print edition: 978-87-92964-02-1 Copy editor: Ailsa Campbell Reference validation: Armin Walinsky Graphics, interior design, and cover: Roland Szattler and Mads Soegaard Copyright clearance: Michael Thorman Proofreader: Ailsa Campbell Supervisory Editors: Mads Soegaard and Rikke Friis Dam Editorial assistant: Soeren Dam Typography: This text is set in Georgia Copyright: See section on Copyright Peer review: This book has undergone double-blinded peer-review based on the reviewing guidelines Production and dissemination of this work has been funded in part by SAP. For Audrey, Alex, Elaine, Elizabeth and the next generations Contents Preface ..................................................................vii Chapter 1. The Evolution of Computing ........................................1 Chapter 2. Design Spaces ...................................................31 Chapter 3. Socio-Technical Design ...........................................51 Chapter 4. Polite Computing ................................................77 Chapter 5. The Social Environment Model ...................................107 Chapter 6. Online Rights ..................................................149 Chapter 7. The Future. 177 Footnotes. 191 References ..............................................................201 Copyright Terms .........................................................213 Preface About this book A socio-technical system (STS) is a social system operating on a technical base. Email, chat, bulletin boards, blogs, Wikipedia, eBay, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube are all socio-technical systems. Hundreds of millions of people use them every day, but how do they work? More importantly, can we build them better? This book is for courses on socio-technical system design. The field changes every year, so each chapter has questions for students to discuss, try out online and report back to the class. The general issues raised may interest users, designers and managers of so- cial software, or anyone interested in social computing. The book questions the view that computing is smart and people are dumb. It says that people in a community are ethical not because they foolishly ignore their self-inter- est but because they intuitively see community gains beyond themselves. As social stan- dards like privacy, freedom, democracy, ownership and transparency can guide online communities, so online successes like Wikipedia suggest new social forms for physical society. Information technology, like fire, is a good servant but a bad master. People and computers are better than people or computers if only people are the senior partner. Social computing takes human centered computing a step further, by introducing the community level. The aim of socio-technical design is no less than to civilize the Internet. The future is socio-technology not technology. We, the authors, hope you, the reader, find our book interesting and useful. Don’t be daunted by the breadth of ideas covered. If both computing and society are complex, vii how could they together be any less? As people are today building socio-technical sys- tems, there is a need for socio-technical design. The ideas presented in this book have been developed over the last decade. They work. They are proven perennials in the ever changing garden of computing. Brian Whitworth, January, 2013 viii ix x Chapter 1 1. The Evolution of Computing Computing is evolving to higher levels “ ” This chapter reviews how computing has evolved since it began, and what this means for “us all” who are building and using it. Chapter Table of Contents 1.1 A (very) Short History of Computing 1.2 Computing Levels 1.3 Levels as World Views 1.4 From Hardware to Software 1.5 From Software to Users 1.6 From Users to Communities 1.7 The Reductionist Dream 1.8 The Requirements Hierarchy 1.9 Design Level Combinations 1.10 The Flower of Computing 1.11 Discussion Questions 1.12 User-contributed notes 1.13 References 1 The Social Design of Technical Systems 1.1 A (very) Short History of Computing The first computer was conceived as a machine of cogs and gears (Figure 1.1) but only became practical in the 1950s and 60s with the invention of semi-conductors. In the 1970s, a hardware company called IBM1 emerged as the computing leader. In the 1980s, however, software became increasingly important, and by the 1990s a software company called Microsoft2 had become the computing frontline leader by giving ordinary people tools like word-processing. During the 1990s computing became more personal, until the World-Wide-Web turned Internet URLs into web site names that people could read3. A company called Google4 then offered the ultimate personal service, free access to the vast public library we call the Internet, and soon everyone’s gateway to the web was the new computing leader. In the 2000s computing evolved yet again, to become a social medium as well as a personal tool. So now Facebook challenges Google, as Google chal- lenged Microsoft, and as Microsoft challenged IBM. Yet to design a computer system one must define it, so what is computing? This deceptively simple question requires many answers because computing has re-invented itself every decade or so (Figure 1.2). What began as hardware became about software, then about users and is now about online communities. This chapter analyzes the evolu- tion of computing as it impacts computing design. 2 The Social Design of Technical Systems Figure 1.1: Charles Babbage (1791-1871) designed the first automatic computing engine. He in- vented computers but failed to build them. The first complete Babbage Engine was completed in London in 2002, 153 years after it was designed. Difference Engine No. 2, built faithfully to the original drawings, consists of 8,000 parts, weighs five tons, and measures 11 feet. Shown above is Serial Number 2, located in Silicon Valley at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California Courtesy of Jitze Couperus. Copyright: CC-Att-SA-2. Click for high resolution 3 The Social Design of Technical Systems Courtesy of Jitze Couperus. Copyright: CC-Att-SA-2. Click for high resolution 4 The Social Design of Technical Systems Figure: Details from Babbage’s difference engine. Courtesy of Jitze Couperus. Copyright: CC-Att-SA-2. 5 The Social Design of Technical Systems Figure 1.2: The computing evolution Courtesy of Brian Whitworth with Adnan Ahmad. Copyright: CC-Att-SA-3. 1.2 Computing Levels The evolution of computing is approached here using Bertalanffy’s general systems the- ory (Bertalanffy, 1968). This theory is based on the observation of discipline isomor- phisms, when different specialist fields discover the same abstract equation or law in different contexts, e.g. a social agreement measure that matches a biological diversity measure (Whitworth, 2006). Bertalanffy proposed a “science of sciences”, namely the study of systems in general, since sociologists study social systems, psychologists cogni- tive systems, computer scientists information systems, and engineers hardware systems. The isomorphisms of science are then general system rules that apply across disciplines. Applying general systems theory to the evolution of computing gives the computing levels shown in Figure 1.3, where a computing system can be studied as a mechanical sys- tem, a software system, a human system or a social system, by engineers, computer sci- entists, psychologists and sociologists respectively. Computing began at the mechanical level, added an information level (software), then a human level and finally a community level; it is an example of general system evolution. 6 The Social Design of Technical Systems Figure 1.3: Computer system levels Courtesy of Brian Whitworth with Adnan Ahmad. Copyright: CC-Att-SA-3. Table 1.1 shows how different levels change not only the system type but also what is ex- changed. So a physical system exchanges energy, a software system exchanges informa- tion, a human system exchanges meaning, and a community system exchanges memes5. Each level of a system evolution is built on the previous, so that social computing emerg- es from personal computing, personal computing emerges from software, and software emerges from hardware. As computing evolves to higher system levels, so its design also changes, from technical to socio-technical design. Levels can clarify the often confusing terms of computing. In Figure 1.3, a technol- ogy is any tool that people build to use6, e.g. a spear is a technology. Technology is de- signed and built by engineers. In contrast information technology (IT) is the application 7 The Social Design of Technical Systems of hardware and software, with a user implied. Computer science (CS)7 is then just about the software level, regardless of the hardware implementation. So information technol- ogy is not a sub-set of technology, nor is computer science a sub-set of engineering (be- cause software is not part of hardware). Human computer interaction (HCI) is a person in front of a computer, a human plus IT system, with physical, informational and psychological levels. Just as IT is more than hardware, so HCI is more than IT because it includes a human level. HCI systems exchange meaning, while IT systems exchange information. The semantic web vision of Tim Berners-Lee, the founder of the World Wide Web — his “dream for the web” — was a recognition