Foundations of Engineering

Research project "The design of hybrid (social/technical) systems"

Project description

In 2003 a research project on the design of hybrid (social/technical) systems was started. The project is motivated by the increasing recognition that technical artefacts function in a social and societal context and that their success or failure largely depends on the extent to which this fact is taken into account during the design process.

Even the design of organisational processes and decision procedures is now seen to be part of the engineering sciences. To emphasize the fact that in many implementations of technology material artefacts are now thoroughly interwoven with human action, the notion of socio-technical systems has been coined. This development brings with it a broadening of the scope of the design activity of engineers. In response to it, methodological reflection on the character of the design process is urgently needed. For, although this broadened scope relates primarily to the social dimension of technology, the engineering sciences remain overwhelmingly focused on the natural sciences. This strong focus on the natural sciences is in itself already responsible for a lack of reflection on the character of design in engineering, which is central to technology but absent from science.

For this reason, the first stage of the project involved a comparative study in which the general nature of the design process is investigated over the spectrum of the engineering sciences. On the basis of this comparative study, the second phase addresses the specific issues of the integration of natural-scientific and social-scientific knowledge in the design of largescale artefacts and the differences in modelling human behaviour and interaction as compared to the behaviour of physical matter.

Apart from the interest of this project for our understanding of technology, the nature of technical artefacts and the designing and functioning of technical artefacts, the project is also important in a more broadly social sense. The development and implementation of large-scale systems takes a large share of public resources. And once in existence, they are difficult to modify or remove, affecting the life of many people on a day-to-day basis nonetheless. The social costs of the failure of such systems are therefore considerable and the social gains of better ones are not to be foregone lightly. Decreasing costs and increasing gains are the more likely, the more improvements are aimed for in the early phases of the lifecycle of such large-scale technical systems. A better understanding of how the interaction of social and material aspects is best taken into account during the process of their design is likely to contribute to this.