Introduction - Informing Digital Futures: Strategies for Citizen Engagement - page 2

and citizen engagement in civil society). Both communities face resource-
intensive challenges to successfully address key issues. For instance, iden-
tifying which groups of citizens are at risk of exclusion in a particular design
context, and engaging 'hard to reach' stakeholders in the community will
be critical common objectives. Any sharing of knowledge and good prac-
tice could ease the burden for both 'sides'. At present, there is no forum
for capturing and sharing the rich knowledge and experiences of participa-
tion across the different design domains. Thus, a primary aim of this topic
is to draw together emerging principles and practices of citizen engage-
ment from across domains, disciplines and territories in a new unifying
and integrated framework.
1.1 Scene Setting
The theme of the topic has its roots in the studies and ideas of sociotechni-
cal change pioneered by the Tavistock Institute in the 1940s and of
planned change published by the Harvard academics, Bennis, Benne and
Chin in the 1960s (Bennis et al. 1969). The key contribution of sociotech-
nical theory is that by focusing on the interdependencies between human
(social and organisational) and technical systems, it overcomes the tradi-
tional 'splitting' of these two activities such that technical design is per-
formed by technologists and the social and organisational aspects are dealt
with subsequently (Klein and Eason 1991). The application of change
management principles and best practice in winning over all stakeholders
(in government, in business and in the community) will be key to achiev-
ing a shift towards sociotechnical design.
The use of terms in this topic has posed some problems. Whilst terms
such as design, designers, users, stakeholders, citizens and technology,
participation and engagement are in frequent use, it is surprisingly difficult
to arrive at coherent definitions which are not to a particular context. We
have tried to adopt the broad definitions which we present below, but our
preference for using these is sometimes at odds with the need to be context
specific. We hope we have achieved a workable compromise such that
readers can be clear about the meaning of our material in each context.
Throughout the text we use the term design in its widest sense, to mean
the process of making decisions about the function and form of an object
or system. However, there are many different areas of design, and each
profession tends to use the word design as though it applies primarily or
exclusively to their field of expertise. So, for example, industrial designers
will tend to use the word design to mean the process of combining stylish