Sociotechnical Systems

Software agents are a means to support socio-technical decentralised systems that increase the complexity of daily life. Designing multi-agent systems involves modelling methods for which it is currently not possible to check for soundness before a technical implementation. To improve the design process, the agent models require a mapping to a formalisation that is sufficiently expressive to represent equivalent model properties. The formalized presentation must cater for evaluating the model soundness, simulation and performance experimentation with different test data. The paper gives a set of mapping heuristics from agent models to a sufficiently expressive formalisation representation that follows a real life running case stemming from the healthcare domain.

This Impact Report identifies and summarises the diverse impacts, resulting from the £500m of UK funding of Science and Technology in 2013, using numerous quantitative metrics and short case study extracts.  It shows how the varied impacts of a national science and technology organization and its many funded programmes can be annually identified, captured, tracked, and summarised in a public document.

The report was produced for, and by, the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) -  the UK Research Council responsible for funding: (1) all UK astronomy, particle and nuclear physics research, (2) related UK science and technology facilities (e.g. as Harwell and Daresbury), (3) the UK contribution to international science (e.g. CERN, international telescopes and space missions), (4) innovation and business spin-off programmes, and (5) UK public engagement activities.

The Report was co-researched and co-authored by the STFC Impact Team, including myself while Impact Evaluation Manager in 2013, with Dr. Claire Dougan-McCallie (lead author/Head of Impact) and Jenny Beard, with additional input from senior managers, and many data and case study contributions from other key managers across STFC.

Varied key impacts are identified and reported including:

• Research amongst the best (by citation impact) in astronomy, nuclear and particle physics.
• Supported research of 226 Principal Investigators in 70 universities, led to 1,100 peer-reviewed papers in 2012.
• Facilities (the Diamond Light Source, ISIS and CLF) were used in 2012/13 by over 4,200 unique users , in over 2,400 experiments, producing over 1,000 papers in peer-reviewed journals.

• Technology from CERN benefited the UK economy by over £100 billion every year.
• Funding the development of the UK’s space, internet and computer animation industries, returned over £500 billion to the UK economy per annum.
• Funded Innovation Campuses hosted over 230 enterprises and supported over 5,000 jobs.
• UK industry won £43 million in contracts from the international subscriptions funded, and had accumulated a total of £150 million since 2005.

• Funded research inspired future generations to study STEM subjects, attracting 90% of UK undergraduates to study physics, funded 782 PhD students  and 16,800 student training days.
• Between 2009 to 2012 public engagement programmes engaged people on 58 million occasions, with 2 million people engaged in face-to-face activities in 2013 alone.

This is a superb work, the result of 10 years of patient, diligent and incisive research. I wish all PhD dissertations were this good! Schlosser has read far and wide to contextualise the incident which nearly resulted in a thermonuclear explosion obliterating Damascus, Arkansas, in 1980.

Cities play a crucial role in shaping coupled human-environment systems at local and global scales. With a view to amounting sustainability deficits, urban stakeholders thus require transformative capacity to perform radical change within and across the multiple socio-ecological and socio-technical systems embedded in cities. However, existing (transformative) ‘capacity’ concepts refer to distinct subjects and purposes and do not adequately address the particularities of urban contexts and/or practical operationalization. Therefore, this paper suggests an integrated conceptual framework for developing ‘urban transformative capacity’, drawing on contributions from a range of research areas. It identifies 10 key components and a range of factors that describe the forms of agency and interaction, development processes and relational dimensions involved in building up urban transformative capacity, emphasizing the vital role of place and scale in this. It thus establishes a baseline and direction for capacity growth. This allows recognizing the particular requirements and assets of diverse types of cities and urban contexts in the global North and South, and offers strategic orientation for urban policy making, planning practice and research.

Square Enix created a series of worlds designed to push the player’s understanding of how social development and interactions could be crafted within the Japanese Role Playing Game genre of video games. The three continents of World A from Final Fantasy I (FF I) to the lonely star known as Eos in Final Fantasy XV (FF XV) provide the backdrop for all of the action that takes place within the game. Players enter a rich cultural experience throughout the series and, in turn, players care about the lives that the different player characters (PCs) and non-player characters (NPCs) go through during the game. These environments and personas represent an almost “mirror world” as it reflects the different eras found on Earth with all of the various forms of strife that existed in our world.

Final Fantasy, as a study in social psychology, represents a complex challenge as the game designers essentially create a new world and society for every version of the game. Few narrative threads connect the overall series. The more significant connections come from the traditional good versus evil battles that are found in Japanese mythological storytelling (along with some references to Judeo-Christian and Islamic religion in character creation). Also, the symbolic components of crystals, life force, and the apocalypse are embedded in the overall storyline. These narrative supports described above built the spiritual overtones that most players of the series would recognize as core to the gaming experience. A broader story arc, which will be the arc examined by this chapter, is the influence of technology within the cultures and societies of these games. The rationale for this analysis is that as the series progressed from FF I to FF XV along an almost similar technological development curve to Earth with the exception that Earth-based technologies were not built upon the foundations of magic or spiritual influences.

The later versions of the game series invoke Arthur C. Clarke’s Third Law of Technology, which states “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” The “uninitiated” outsider that the player represents would look at a society like the Garleans from Final Fantasy XIV that has the capability to grab a moon for the sole purpose of weaponizing it to destroy the other “primitive” nations and control all of the world of Hydaelyn as a magical place that should be fear. This fear is in contrast to the world of Earth were nations have the capability of destroying and controlling merely through the weaponization of the atom.

This broader discussion of technology is not merely to look at how technologies drive the various nations from the Final Fantasy universe. After all, the PCs and NPCs are motivated more by the game designers’ algorithms and narratives than the more baser psychological drives of man. This writing instead will use a few of the critical worlds from the series as a model to explain how technology influences human behavior in the real world. Final Fantasy as a series raises the problems people experience with technology on a day-to-day basis. Technologies in their most basic form represent a power structure and cultural mindset that people have accepted as part of the norms of society. These power structures and cultural mindsets are made explicit when the players play these games.

This critical discussion of technology will need to be framed by the right set of theories. It seems that these worlds could use the work of philosophers to examine vital socio-technical concerns. One philosopher in particular, Martin Heidegger, would provide a good grounding for this discussion because of his work on technology and modern society.

Background
Bumble is a self-declared “feminist” dating app that gives women control over initiating conversations with potential matches.

Analysis
Through a material-semiotic analysis of Bumble’s software and online media about the app, this article critically investigates how gender, sex, and sexuality are produced and given meaning by Bumble’s programmed infrastructure.

Conclusions and implications
Since the epistemological underpinnings of Bumble’s design centre gender as the solitary axis of oppression, the authors argue that the app’s infrastructure generates an ontological relationship between gender, sex, and sexuality that narrows the capacity to achieve its creators’ stated social justice objectives. Several infrastructural failures are detailed to demonstrate how control and safety are 1) optimized for straight cisgender women, and 2) contingent on the inscription of an aggressive form of masculinity onto straight male bodies.

As of the late 2010s, the music industry and the information and communication technology sector have fully converged. Music sales by online streaming in the United States doubled between 2014 and 2016 (from US$1.24 billion to US$2.48 billion), and as of 2017 accounted for 66% of sales in total; subscription models generated about 70% of streaming revenue, making them the single most profitable music format in the U.S. market. These developments, which would have been inconceivable during the 1990s heyday of informal MP3 sharing, exemplify the ways that technical innovation can reshape not only industries but also everyday practices. This entry briefly introduces a key innovation of the streaming music sector: algorithmic recommender systems (RSs). After discussing the commodity forms of music and the role of recommendation in taste formation, the entry introduces some basic technical aspects of RS and concludes with an exploration of their potential near-future economic and sociocultural impact.

This research, conducted by the author when a Senior Researcher at Newcastle University, UK, was funded by a UK governance organisation to help them assess, integrate and improve their understanding of the governed population.

ABSTRACT: Governance organisations have been urged to develop more holistic evidence-based approaches with partners to better deal with issues affecting the governed population. This presupposes an understanding of the population, yet there has been little research work addressing how governance organisations come to understand their governed population, nor how this understanding can be improved upon within such organisations.

This case study examined in-depth how understanding of a governed population was developed within one UK local governance organisation and it explored how such understanding might be developed and improved through more holistic and evidence-based organisational learning within the organisation and its governance partnerships.

The research methodology involved placement within the governance organisation, participant observations on several projects and innovative initiatives, observations within, across, and outside the organisation, and also interviews with varied key stakeholders.

The study examined:

- stakeholder engagement and networks
- current and varied understandings of the population
- mechanisms actually used for developing understandings
- the influence of context on organisational learning

and analysed these to arrive at a recommendations to improve organisational understanding of the governed population.

In the case studied, significant strengths were found: including innovative past learning trials for development, extensive ongoing networking activities, and many varied and accumulating quantitative datasets available across partnerships.

However, entrenched organisational approaches and practices constrained the development of holistic evidence-based understanding, for instance: the absence of systematic maintained collective learning processes; weak recording and forgetting of understandings; methodological exclusion of stakeholders from the development of understanding; the relative neglect of qualitative data, explanations, investigations, interpretations, and reflexivity; and also implicit organisational acceptance of such limitations and low aspirations.

Nonetheless, untapped opportunities existed to enable change including: latent practitioner knowledge and innovative management champions, the desire for improvement and raised aspirations within learning networks, and the development potential of alterative learning approaches.

It was concluded that more holistic evidence-based understanding was possible, but required new learning approaches beyond those then in use in both local government or academia.   

Recommendations are made to utilise and develop improved organisational learning approaches trialed and reported in the case study.

It is argued that the case study findings, conclusions, and recommendations may be applicable to other similar local governance organisations and partnerships that seek to better understand local populations, services and interventions.

The work was also submitted for, and awarded, an MPhil (at Newcastle University, supervised by Prof. Patsy Healy)

Discourse analysts have worked on digital data for decades now (see Herring, 1999; Thurlow & Mroczek 2011), initially treating digital data as human texts (Blitvich & Bou-Franch, 2018), then increasingly as human, multimodal interaction mediated through digital media (Androutsopoulous, 2015), also attending to digital platforms and their affordances in ethnographically inspired discourse analyses (

Our society is on an unsustainable pathway exemplified by anthropogenic climate change, deforestation, human displacements and species extinction (IPCC 2018 ). Altering this pathway requires a combination of technical, organisational, economic, institutional, social-cultural and political efforts that are increasingly referred to as socio-technical transitions to an environmentally sustainable economy (Van den Bergh, Truffer, and Kallis 2011). Transitions research has developed frameworks and methods (e.g. Geels, Berkhout, and van Vuuren 2016; Papachristos 2018a) for understanding historical and contemporary transitions and for exploring system interventions related to governance and sustainability transitions (Smith, Voß, and Grin 2010). While qualitative, narrative-based case studies dominated early research, modelling and simulation approaches have recently gained ground. These latter approaches are particularly suited to explore interdependencies across different system elements (Bergman et al. 2008; Papachristos 2011, 2014a; Holtz et al. 2015; Walrave and Raven 2016; Köhler et al. 2018) and to perform counter-factual analysis (Sterman 2002) that allows posing ‘what-if’ questions and avoiding potential selection biases that limit the power of pure empirical analysis. In this chapter we discuss how system dynamics (SD) modelling and simulation (Sterman 2000) can contribute to and complement – rather than substitute for – other methods in transitions research. SD is an established modelling and simulation research methodology that spans several subject areas (Sterman 2018). The phenomena discussed in the transitions literature are aligned with the foundational ideas of SD – a problem orientation, broad model boundaries across multiple realms and an ‘endogenous point of view’ towards processes of system change that are driven by actor decisions (Richardson 2011). Thus, SD is well suited to addressing transitions research questions that relate to high-leverage policies (Van den Bergh, Truffer, and Kallis 2011). As is the case with any modelling and simulation methodology considered for transition research, there are certain weaknesses that are worth bearing in mind (Turnheim et al. 2015) and the methodological approaches proposed to overcome them (e.g. Geels, Berkhout, and van Vuuren 2016; Papachristos 2018a). The chapter is structured as follows. Section 2 briefly overviews transitions research and some critical contemporary research issues. Section 3 briefly summarises SD history and foundations. Section 4 discusses the core SD practices and how they can provide entry points for transitions research. Section 5 discusses exemplary SD work relevant to transitions research across three levels of analysis: macro, meso and micro. Emphasis is on the meso level, as this level is also central in transitions research (Geels 2002; Geels and Schot 2007). In Section 6 we discuss some key opportunities and challenges for applying SD methods in transitions research.

The biopsychosocial model is among the most influential frameworks for human-centered health improvement but has faced significant criticism-both conceptual and pragmatic. This paper extends and fundamentally restructures the biopsychosocial model by combining it with sociotechnical systems theory. The resulting biopsychosociotechnical model addresses key critiques of the biopsychosocial model, providing a more "practical theory" for humancentered health improvement. It depicts the determinants of health as complex adaptive system of systems; includes the the artificial world (technology); and provides a roadmap for systems improvement by: differentiating between "health status" and "health and needs assessment", [promoting problem framing]; explaining health as an emergent property of the biopsychosociotechnical context [imposing a systems orientation]; focusing on "interventions" vs. "treatments" to modify the biopsychosociotechnical determinants of health, [expanding the solution space]; calling for a participatory design process [supporting systems awareness and goal-orientation]; and including intervention management to support the full lifecycle of health improvement.

This chapter juxtaposes the transition management approach with the rationalities and instruments of urban planning. Considering the historic evolution and current characteristics of mainstream urban planning in theory and practice, it identifies key challenges and opportunities for engaging with transition management. The discussion underlines the strengths and weaknesses of both approaches, but also their incompatibility. This implies to conceive of a dialectic relation between urban planning and transition management: Deliberately striving for coordinated independence, creating synergies and mutually compensating for critical deficits in order to effectively perform urban sustainability transformations.

The effect of national culture on the performance of teams is becoming an increasingly important issue in advanced western countries. There are many interlinked reasons for this, including the increasing globalisation of companies and the use of joint ventures for the development of expensive platforms. A further issue relates to the export of complex socio-technical systems, where a culture clash between designer/manufacturer and user can lead to significant problems.
This report describes research work that was carried out to analyse the cultural factors that influence the performance of teams (including researchers, designers, operators and crews), and to determine whether these factors could be captured in a tool to provide assistance to team managers and team builders. The original point of interest related to the development of increasingly complex sociotechnical systems, for example nuclear power stations, oil refineries, offshore oil platforms, hospital systems and large transport aircraft. Answers that might be sought, in particular by the senior managers of global companies, include (1) the best teams (or best national locations) for fundamental research, industrial research & development, product/system improvement and other key activities, and (2) the implications for system performance and, as a result, for system design, of targeting an eastern Asian market, a South-American market, etc.
A literature review was carried out of the effects of culture on team performance, of culture measures and tools and of task classifications; in addition, empirical evidence of the validity of measures and tools was sought. Significant evidence was found of the effects of culture on teams and crews, but no national culture-based team performance prediction tools were found. Based on the results of the literature review, Hofstede’s original four-dimension cultural framework was selected as the basis for the collection and analysis of empirical data, including the results of studies from the literature and the researcher’s own empirical studies. No team or task classification system was found that was suitable for the purposes of linking culture to team performance, so a five-factor task classification was developed, based on the literature review, to form the basis of the initial modelling work.
A detailed analysis of results from the literature and from the author’s pilot studies revealed additional culture-performance relationships, including those relating to cultural diversity. Three culture-performance models were incorporated into software tools that offered performance prediction capabilities. The first model was primarily a test bed for ideas; the second model incorporated a task/behavioural approach which achieved limited success; the third and final model was evaluated against a range of team and crew performance data before being tested successfully for acceptability by users.
The research results indicated that the effects of cultural diversity must be sought at the individual cultural dimension level not at the composite level, that the effects of national culture on team performance were consistent and strong enough to be usefully captured in a predictive culture tool and that the relationships between culture and behaviour were moderated by contextual factors.

Sustainable development at a global and local scale heavily depends upon the pathways taken by cities in the near future. Within scientific research, this frequently identified " urban challenge " has been recognized and addressed increasingly in urban studies, as well as in transformation studies. However, while both fields clearly overlap and effectively complement each other in this regard, the respective epistemic communities have largely remained separate so far. Therefore, this paper elaborates on the core concepts and approaches that dominate the emerging scientific debate on the role of cities in sustainability transitions. Based on a methodic literature review, it delineates the progressive convergence of the diverse disciplines involved over four major research perspectives. It equally derives key conclusions for future research and policy, highlighting the urgent need to connect the four fields identified, to link socio-technical and social-ecological system (SES) perspectives, to conceive of holistic innovations for developing new planning approaches, and to fully embrace transdisciplinarity by practicing science in society.

This article locates its roots/routes in multiple disciplinary formations and it seeks to advance critical thinking about an aspect of our contemporary socio-technical challenges by bracketing three knowledge formations—artificial intelligence (AI), economics, and epistemology—that have not often been considered together. In doing so, it responds to the growing calls for the necessity of further transdisciplinary engagements that have emanated from work in AI and also from other disciplines. The structure of the argument here is as follows. First, I begin by demonstrating how and why explanation is a problem in AI (“XAI problem”) and what directions are being taken by recent research that draws upon social sciences to address this, noting how there is a conspicuous lack of reference in this literature to economics. Second, I identify and analyze a problem of explanation that has long plagued economics too as a discipline. I show how only a few economists have ever attempted to grapple with this problem and provide their perspectives. Third, I provide an original genealogy of explanation in economics, demonstrating the changing nature of what was meant by an explanation. These systematic changes in consensual understanding of what occurs when something is said to have been “explained”, have reflected the methodological compromises that were rendered necessary to serve different epistemological tensions over time. Lastly, I identify the various relevant historical and conceptual overlaps between economics and AI. I conclude by suggesting that we must pay greater attention to the epistemologies underpinning socio-technical knowledges about the human. The problem of explanation in AI, like the problem of explanation in economics, is perhaps not only, or really, a problem of satisfactory explanation provision alone, but interwoven with questions of competing epistemological and ethical choices and related to the ways in which we choose sociotechnical arrangements and offer consent to be governed by them.

As a result of technological advancement and exponential increases in global access, cross-disciplinary research has recently turned to digital online video games. Most anthropological research within this area has centered around player self-identification, gender construction, and gaming communities. Yet many interactions occur at nodes of dynamic conflict where agentic players navigate intersections of power, which are unaddressed in the scholarly corpus. By utilizing ethnographic methods in World of Warcraft’s player versus player events, I examine resources, relationships, and tools that underpin player actions and understandings. My findings reveal layered and dynamic patterns of sociotechnical conflict. Players’ geographical location impacts access to infrastructure while hardware and software constrain in-game action in fundamental and inescapable ways. Player versus player events add additional restrictions and create fluid situations where players continually negotiate fluctuating social tensions while event-dependent dispersions of power fluctuate between groups and individuals. Players become leaders by legitimizing power in contextually unique ways, and competing imaginaries generate conflicts that are interpreted through game-specific subjectivities. In exploring these occurrences and utilizing theoretical explanations within World of Warcraft contexts, this research contributes to disciplinary understandings and discussions addressing conflict, leadership, and power, and to methodological techniques utilized in virtual world study. By foregrounding how players navigate power differentials in conflict situations, this research informs broader conceptions of how individuals and groups manage social disputes within and outside digital social events, informs game design, and has policy implications for resolving virtual world conflicts in real world courts.

From the sustainability perspective an important question is whether transitions can be induced or stimulated. In the strict sense, the answer is ‘no’ given the complex nature of transitions. What is possible, though, is to try and stimulate developments in specific more sustainable direction over a longer period of time (Rotmans et al. 2000 and 2001). This requires a vision on which directions that might be, i.e. which combination(s) of technologies and their societal embedding might render a sustainable system. To help develop such visions scenario studies or other forsight methods are used.
There exists a variety of scenario and foresight methodologies each of which has its own strength but also has limitations, especially in exploring the complex and crooked sort of processes that characterise a transition. To remedy these limitations we have developed a new scenario method based on a scientifically supported theory on transitions. We call this method ‘Socio-Technical Scenarios’ (STSc).

We are used to considering human agency as the most important aspect of the educational process. Materials and objects tend to be ignored or dismissed as agents. Technologies, as well, have been considered as inert matter, subordinated to human intention and design, as if they did not have a role in the eclectic combination of teaching, learning, and knowing about the world. Their agency is invisible until a breakdown occurs, a material moment which shows their doing. In this paper, we make digital action visible by focusing on emergency remote teaching in higher education during the Covid-19 pandemic breakdown. Data were collected/co-created in a graduate course in Education in the first three months of lockdown in Brazil. Through a queer assemblage of teaching-researching-writing, we present a sociomaterial analysis that shows multiple entanglements of bodies, material things, and pedagogic time-spaces. In this exercise, social inequality issues, power structures and ethical problems come to the surface, while students struggle for quality participation in the digitised classes.

This paper discusses the crucial role cities play in the emergence and formation of grassroots socio-technical niches for sustainability transitions. Drawing on research engaged with strategic niche management, grassroots innovations and urban social innovations, it conceptualizes the interdependencies between urban contexts and grassroots niche dynamics, and explores a critical case in point: Current policy efforts in the city of Seoul to create, diversify and network social innovations in urban neighborhoods. The case illustrates how innovative place-making activities in everyday-life urban environs draws on empowerment, proximity and institutional thickness to meet basic conditions for niche formation in terms of networking, shared expectations and social learning, while also raising new issues of inclusion, legitimacy and strategy. In conclusion, four issues are highlighted that appear to decisively impact on the formation of urban grassroots niche and related sustainability transition pathways: 1) Urban empowerment capacities, 2) Embedded holistic innovation, 3) Novel community-oriented governance modes, and 4) Urban niche/regime interactions. These issues thus require particular attention in future research and policy in order to guide the coevolution of cities and urban grassroots initiatives towards sustainability.

When people die, they are increasingly leaving digital
'footprints' behind. We outline a novel area of research: how
these digital 'footprints' can be bequeathed, inherited and
appropriately repurposed. This is an area which has high
potential for innovation and impact within the RCUK Digital
Economy program, and upon the wider community.

A better understanding of the role of domestic dwellings in shaping past social relations is needed. Here, Northern Iroquoian longhouses are studied as sociotechnical systems, following Pfaffenberger (1992). This approach allows us to appreciate how social relations were generated and contested in the very activities of building and living in houses. I examine a sample of pre-Columbian longhouses from southern Ontario, Canada. Variation in aspects of house construction, spatial layout, and ritual indicates that sociotechnical networks associated with different houses were variable in scale, durability, and organization. What emerges is the sense that a dynamic, driving tension between forces of collectivization and atomization, inclusion and exclusion, lay at the heart of longhouse life.

This paper explores the relationship between artificial intelligence and principles of distributive justice. Drawing upon the political philosophy of John Rawls, it holds that the basic structure of society should be understood as a composite of socio-technical systems, and that the operation of these systems is increasingly shaped and influenced by AI. As a consequence, egalitarian norms of justice apply to the technology when it is deployed in these contexts. These norms entail that the relevant AI systems must meet a certain standard of public justification, support citizens rights, and promote substantively fair outcomes – something that requires specific attention be paid to the impact they have on the worst-off members of society.

This dissertation studies the impact of work design, organizational structure and career development practices/policies on competence development in the course of R&D staff careers. Main perspectives: R&D management, technology management, human resource development, career management, management cybernetics, systems perspective.

The field of archaeomaterials research has enormous potential to shed light on past innovation processes. However , this potential has been only partially recognized outside its immediate practitioners, despite the fact that innovation and technology change are topics of enduring interest in archaeology and the broader social sciences. This review explores the relationship between archaeomaterials research and the interdisciplinary study of innovation, and maps out a path toward greater integration of materials analysis into these discussions. To foster this integration, this review has three aims. First, I sketch the theoretical landscape of approaches to the study of innovation in archaeology and neighboring disciplines. I trace how theoretical traditions like evolutionary archaeology have influenced archaeomaterials approaches to questions of technological change while also highlighting cases where work by archaeomaterials researchers anticipated trends in the anthropology of technology. Next, I distill a series of core concerns that crosscut these different theoretical perspectives. Finally, I describe examples where archaeomaterials research has deepened scholarly understanding of innovation processes and addressed these core questions. The future of archaeomaterials research lies in engagement with these broader discussions and effective communication of the contributions that materials analysis can make to building a comparative understanding of innovation processes.

Urban transformation research forms an emergent interdisciplinary field with open boundaries that combines complex system studies and urban studies. It explores patterns and dynamics of change linking cities and diverse socio-technical systems and social-ecological systems across levels and scales, and develops new forms of intervention to foster their sustainability. This paper identifies and maps out the current status in this field and derives strategic recommendations for future research. It delineates a spectrum of recurrent epistemologies concerned with either system change, urban change or urban/system interactions, linked to an emphasis on urban metabolism, resilient communities and ecosystems, grassroots innovations or urban innovation systems. Moreover, seven key factors co-shaping urban transformations are recognized (agency, politics, capacity, policy, experiments, foresight and geography). To better exploit potential synergies between existing strands and address gaps in the light of imminent urban sustainability challenges, future urban transformation research should 1) Share a relational perspective that connects the above epistemologies; 2) Identify and engage with the spatial-institutional challenges of urban transformations; 3) Move towards multi-system approaches linking various sectors and domains; and 4) Focus on transformative capacity and its agency components as an empowering lever and guide for systemic urban change.

Abstract: - Humans beings are the main actors in any system created in the Information and Communication Technology. From system conception to its discard, humans are present. Humans are the system designers, system developers, system users and humans are affected by the system, ...

Volvo has become a byword for advanced thinking in work design, in new forms of production, in collaborative implementation, in worker participation and satisfaction… When practitioners, be they management, trade union or academic have to give shape to possible new futures, alternatives to Taylorism or examples of best practice then it is to the plants such as Vara, Kalmar and later Uddevalla that they turn.

Machines, from artificially intelligent digital assistants to embodied robots, are becoming more pervasive in everyday life. Drawing on feminist science and technology studies (STS) perspectives, we demonstrate how machine designers are not just crafting neutral objects, but relationships between machines and humans that are entangled in human social issues such as gender and power dynamics. Thus, in order to create a more ethical and just future, the dominant assumptions currently underpinning the design of these human-machine relations must be challenged and reoriented toward relations of justice and inclusivity. This paper contributes the "social machine" as a model for technology designers who seek to recognize the importance, diversity and complexity of the social in their work, and to engage with the agential power of machines. In our model, the social machine is imagined as a potentially equitable relationship partner that has agency and as an "other" that is distinct from, yet related to, humans, objects, and animals. We critically examine and contrast our model with tendencies in robotics that consider robots as tools, human companions, animals or creatures, and/or slaves. In doing so, we demonstrate ingrained dominant assumptions about human-machine relations and reveal the challenges of radical thinking in the social machine design space. Finally, we present two design challenges based on non-anthropomorphic figuration and mutuality, and call for experimentation, unlearning dominant tendencies, and reimagining of sociotechnical futures.