Socio-tech designDr Terence love and Dr Trudi Cooper at Love Design and Research have developed several new approaches to designing and analysing socio-technical systems. These new approaches provide an improved process for designing interventions and also give significant insights into addressing 'wicked' design problems (see 'Research Papers' in left hand menu).
Our special interest is in dynamically changing, highly complex socio-technical systems design that includes multiple and changing stakeholders and constituencies, dynamically changing technology, dynamically changing control and ownership and multiple overlapping subsystems.
Socio-technical system design services we supply include:
- Design of system interventions.
- Evaluation of strategies and interventions
- System mapping
- Systems constitutency analyses
- Variety analyses (control and system development)
- Power and control analyses relating to social groups, politics and force
- Causal loop diagramming
- System dynamic modelling
- Agent-based modelling
- Futures/scenario planning
- System observaiton and analysis
- Participatory design processes
- Collaborative design processes
- Multi-agency collaborative design
- Socio-technical problem resolution
Areas of practical application include airport management systems, complex security/crime prevention/anti-terrorism, organisational interventions, business process planning, technology development scenarios, multi-organisation technology platform design.
Techniques available include conventional socially-based design and analysis processes, process mapping, systems analysis/design and interactive-computer-based modeling.
