Social: Social Cognition and Teamwork - Foundations for Designing User-Centered Systems - page 220

Chapter 8
Social: Social Cognition and Teamwork
Abstract Most work is carried out by people working as part of a team. Even
where work is carried out by one person it is likely to be in connection if not in
collaboration with other people. This could be in a formal organization that has
standard operating procedures or as part of a larger system, or it could be part of an
informal group of loosely organized collaborators. Social processes—how people
interact with each other—are important; they affect how systems interfaces are
used. Any system that supports more than one person needs to take these phe-
nomena into account along with the various factors that define the social context in
which users especially user working in teams will make decisions take actions
including extrinsic intrinsic motivation. In this chapter we introduce some con-
cepts that have proven to be important for system adoption use.
8.1 Introduction
Much early work in HCI focused on single users because at that time most tasks
were performed by individuals working on independent computers. However, even
in the 1970s, as increased computer use came to the workplace, there was rec-
ognition that we need to consider social aspects of system use:
We believe that the engineer who deals with human performance should avoid two faults
that have made the ''efficiency expert'' one of the most hated in industry: (1) the neglect of
personal and of social variables, and (2) the use of people as means to ends they do not
share and do not determine. If a person is to design tasks for others, he has the respon-
sibility to attempt to see the tasks and their implications in a wider context and to attempt
to ensure that they are life-enhancing. This is not easy to do, nor are the criteria clear cut.
It requires that the designer himself close feedback loops with reality at several levels, not
only at the level of specific performance criteria of the given system or of the human task
which are part of it, but also at the level of his own personal values (Sheridan and Ferrell
1974 , pp. 18-19).
As distributed, networked computing systems have become the norm, team or
group working has become routine, and the importance of social processes has
risen (see, for example, Hinds and Kiesler 2002 ). We now have a much better