Citizen Engagement in ICT Design: The Challenge - Informing Digital Futures: Strategies for Citizen Engagement - page 127

Participatory and inclusive design approaches.
Together these four approaches offer a conceptual and methodological
framework to support the construction of strategies for engagement and
participation and their implementation. Such an integrated approach would
offer opportunities for empowering a wide range of citizens and engaging
them in the shaping of sociotechnical systems, within the context of local
information ecologies. In addition to the four constituents identified, there
is an important role for the application of change management principles
to achieve the required shift in design practice. In the following sections
we shall describe the contributions of all five approaches in more detail.

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7.2.2 A Sociotechnical Approach to Design

Sociotechnical theory originated from the work of Eric Trist and Ken

Bamforth, researchers at the renowned Tavistock Institute for Human
Relations, during the 1950s and 1960s (Trist and Bamforth 1951). Their

study of coal mining in County Durham, UK, revealed that groups of min-
ers working the same coal seam and using identical technology, had devel-
oped two quite distinct ways of working. This work led to the development
of sociotechnical theory, which reflects the fact that all systems consist of
social and organizational elements as well as technical elements, which are
interdependent. This means for example, that if one component of a system
is disturbed or changed, there will be ramifications throughout the system,
often in unexpected ways and with outcomes that were not predicted. Socio-
technical theory emphasizes that successful systems require the simultane-
ous configuration of both 'technical' and 'organizational and social' aspects
of the system. In this respect it shares features with 'open systems' theory
(Von Bertalanffy 1976) which was developing at around the same time,
and which has also had some influence on approaches to ICT design.
Lisl Klein (Klein and Eason 1991) points out that the basic premise of
sociotechnical theory was not in itself new, since Marx had revealed the
interdependence between the social and the technical. However, the
Tavistock researchers both gave a name to the theory and took it down
from the macrosocietal level to the work system level, where it can be
more easily applied. Here, in the context of citizen engagement, we pro-
pose adapting some of these key concepts of sociotechnical theory for ap-
plication to wider society, beyond the workplace - returning them to their
origins as macrosocietal constructs.
Berniker (1992) asserts that “ in the half century since the Durham coal
mine experiences, sociotechnical systems (STS) analysis practice has
evolved into an effective technique for the design of innovative work