 So far, in this section to the course, we've talked about basic technologies, the complex engineered systems we get out of the aggregation of many different technologies, and the information systems that increasingly control and operate all this technology. In this module, we'll be completing the first section to the course by adding the social domain to this model. Today, the information revolution is driving rapid technological change, as we live in environments that are increasingly technology saturated. It makes the question of the relationship between people and technology more explicit than ever, and it is this relationship between the two that the domain of socio-technical systems tries to understand, model and optimize. Sociotechnical systems is an approach to the study and design of complex organizations and technologies that recognizes the interplay between people and technology as a defining factor in their overall makeup and functioning. This is both on the micro level of how an individual interacts with a particular technology in a linear fashion where we are interested in interface design and user experience, but also on the macro level, referring to the complex non-linear interactions between society's infrastructure and its socio-cultural domains. The ultimate functioning of almost all technologies will involve the interaction between people and technology. Whether we're talking about a wheelbarrow, a car or a subway station, the end throughput to the whole process requires these two elements to function together, and socio-technical systems builds upon systems theory to look at how the whole thing works together in affecting a joint outcome. To take some examples of this, we could think about the current state of genetic engineering. Scientists and engineers may spend decades researching and developing the technologies, but if society decides it will not adopt it for ethical and environmental concerns, then the whole exercise is somewhat futile, which is exactly what has happened in the European Union. But to take another example, web developers in Silicon Valley may build software with all sorts of bells and whistles, expecting everyone to be tech savvy, but if a large percentage of these users are in fact elderly and unaccustomed to the interface, then gain the actual throughput to the whole system will be significantly reduced. And this is what we're interested in with the domain of socio-technical systems, the actual throughput to the whole system, not just its technical dimension. Our traditional design and engineering practice is based upon the use of reductionism, which involves the breaking down of complex systems into components and focusing on optimizing these components in isolation. The social world of people and the technical world of technology runs on very different principles and often the first stage in this process of breaking a system down is the division between people and technology. So let's first think about how these two domains differ in their nature. Firstly, we'll talk about the technical domain. The technical domain is conceived of and designed by a relatively small number of scientists and engineers who actually understand how things work and importantly are responsible for making things work. Most of society has very limited understanding of this and largely takes these technologies for granted. As we've previously discussed, technology is the product of a process of rationalization through which we come to a well-defined and logical sequence of steps for effectively solving a particular problem and then embody this in some physical object or work process. Behind every large organization today, there is a mass of logic processors being performed by our systems of technology. From this perspective, humans look like they go around with their heads in the clouds wondering about who to marry or what color shoes to wear without an idea for how things really work. Logic is not something that typically comes natural to human beings. Your average person is driven by a mass of psychological, emotional and ideological needs and desires. Logically analyzing something requires a certain amount of energy and focus that most people will typically avoid and less specifically required. We use all sorts of heuristics and shortcuts to maintain a certain flow to our lives. In the US, only about 15% of graduates are in the technical STEM areas of math, science, engineering and technology. In short, most people aren't engineers or computer geeks, they just want to get on with pursuing their interests. The last thing they want to do is have to read and follow each step in the instruction manual. Not only do people actively try to avoid the use of logic, they often actually feel threatened by it. From the perspective of most people, faced with these vast systems of logic that support us, they appear empty and mechanical. They threaten our sense of meaning, values, identity and make us feel powerless in a world of incomprehensible complexity where we long for some form of unity and simplicity. This is a somewhat hyperbolic picture of the dichotomy between the social and technical domains, but it helps to illustrate the core constraint here. To sum it up in just a few words, we might say that it is the dichotomy between the qualitative and continuous nature to people and the quantitative, discrete nature to technology. This divide between the fundamental nature to humans and technology and the friction it creates permeates all areas of our systems of organization from the design of user interfaces and healthcare systems to people's uneasy feeling about robotics. One way of understanding and giving structure to this dichotomy is through the DIKW framework that we previously touched upon, the DIKW framework that describes the hierarchical structure to information increasingly captures the divide between technology that operates on the level of data and information on the one hand and people that in advanced economies are increasingly required to perform knowledge work. When we overemphasize the technical domain, we may end up with a very technically efficient system, but it will also be alienating leaving people feeling disenfranchised and ultimately result in disengagement. Inversely, when we give precedence to the social domain, we can get a lack of technical efficiency, incapacity to automate basic processes and lack of technological capabilities. Developing integrated socio-technical systems requires a balance of both and importantly the integration between them through interfaces that are able to translate the language of one domain into the other. Interfaces like the dashboard on our car, the signs in an airport or the graphical user interface to your computer are the contact points between the two systems. They both have to communicate in order to affect the joint outcome. Interfaces are the way of communicating to people the set of procedures required for operating the technology. They reflect the underlining logic and algorithms through which the technology functions but are expected to do so in a fashion that makes sense to the end user. On the social side they use symbols, metaphors and stories that people instinctively relate to. The point of an interface is to translate the language and functionality of the system into the language of the end user and vice versa. But technology is typically designed in domains specific to engineering. A building may be composed of a hydraulic system, electrical system, heating and so on. It is also the same on the macro scale with different companies operating airports, subways and motorways. The services revolution is about networking these technologies and domains into a process that end users interact with through digital interfaces and this is increasingly the structure to our complex engineered systems from end user to digital app to service process to physical technology. This is the multi-tiered framework that works to integrate the functioning of people with our physical technologies and it reflects the hierarchy of information. The domain of socio-technical systems is not just about how people interact with pre-existing technologies but also about how organizations adapt to and evolve with new technologies. Ever since the advent of the industrial revolution social organizations have been subjected to continuous technological change that requires us to adapt to new systems and new ways of working on a regular basis. There are a number of different aspects to this change process that need to be considered in order to achieve a desired outcome such as identifying and setting the systems goals that requires us to take into consideration the perspective of multiple stakeholders, the training of new operators, the integration of this subsystem or process into the whole system and the stabilization of this new pattern of working and of course there are many points along the way where inertia and power dynamics can distort or even reverse the process. People don't always behave rationally particularly when the technology or new process touches upon aspects of culture that involve a sense of identity and narrative. Some technologies get adopted while others go by the wayside not always because of their technical efficiency but simply because they fitted or didn't fit with that society's beliefs values and identity. As our earlier example with genetically modified crops illustrated technologies like GMO bring with them a whole set of ethical and moral considerations that a society or group of people may not have found any solutions to yet and thus they will either have to reject it or adopt it without being able to integrate it into their value system which will likely cause further problems down the line and this is currently the state with many new technologies such as biotech, nanotech, artificial intelligence and cognitive technologies all of which our society doesn't have the philosophical framework through which to fully contextualize them and their ethical considerations. The industrial age was one of standardization and mechanization in order to reduce the complexity of the interaction between people and technology people were simply expected to fit in with abstract mechanistic processes procedures and systems of organization as exemplified by the industrial age model of education and factory work but this industrial economy is rapidly becoming a thing of the past as manufacturing and basic information processing have become commoditized. Post-industrial service and information economies require a new set of skills and human capital based around innovation, entrepreneurship, education and knowledge none of which really happen without the engagement of the subjective and qualitative dimension to people. This requires us to go beyond the technocratic paradigm of industrialism and recognize the importance of the social domain within our engineered environment to build this next generation of complex sociotechnical systems requires engineering based upon a diverse skillset and cross-domain competencies in both technical domains social science and humanities and inter-domain engineering teams. Again this is another vector that greatly increases the complexity of our engineered environment through an increase in the non-linear networked interactions between the social and technical domains. In this module we've been taking an overview to the area of sociotechnical systems that we defined as an approach to the study and design of complex organizations and technologies that recognizes the interplay between people and technology as a defining factor in the system's overall makeup and functionality. We talked about the dichotomy between the social and technical domains as one that is marked by this divide between the continuous qualitative nature to social systems and the discrete quantitative nature to the technical domains. We discussed how the DIKW framework can be used as a model through which to interpret and give some structure to these sociotechnical systems. We looked at how interfaces work as the link between different domains and how a combination of service design and information technology is working to create a new pattern of organization where end users interface with digital devices to access a service process that aggregates different technologies. Finally we briefly touched upon the process of technological change within organizations and how it significantly depends upon socio-cultural dynamics.