Social: Theories and Models - Foundations for Designing User-Centered Systems - page 268

in AI and in organizational process, and in the Journal of Mathematical Sociology
and Computational and Mathematical Organization Theory. Search engines can
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9.4.6 Summary
These approaches to modeling social processes offer different advantages and
disadvantages. The analytic models can represent large systems, over millions of
entities. They can be used to provide useful suggestions for public policy. On the
other hand, their details get applied millions of times and their assumptions can
become very important but at the same time hard to know.
The process models work harder to get the details right on a more fine-grained
level but have difficulty scaling. Process models can be used to provide useful
suggestions on smaller scale systems, but they cannot provide as many suggestions
on large scale systems because they cannot simulate very large systems because
they require so much computational power. They are useful, however, in simu-
lations and games because they can live in an environment.
9.5 General Implications for System Design
Whenever you design a new system, it will almost invariably be a socio-technical
system (the main exceptions are some deeply embedded systems that speak only to
other pieces of technology). In other words, there will be a social system involved.
You will need to take account of that social system, because the technology and
the social system will be interdependent and interact. If you do not spend time and
effort understanding the existing social system, you run the risk of adversely
affecting it—if staff have to spend more time on interacting with the new tech-
nology that takes away time from communication or learning, for example—and
can end up in the situation where staff will simply stop using the new technology
because it gets in the way of them doing their job.
Many of the implications for system design require you to think about the
impact of the system that you are designing. In some cases there will be aspects of
interaction that you can build into your system, but in others it will be a case of
making sure that what you have designed does not take anything away from what
already exists (or if it does, it improves the overall socio-technical system). The
modeling tools and techniques described in Sect. 9.8 should help.
The first thing you need to consider is how people work together in the envi-
ronment where your system will be deployed. If you are putting a global system in
place, along the lines of YouTube for example, which has distributed users, you
may want to create local regions within the system that will help to encourage use
and participation. You will also need to think about creating the most appropriate