Maps, Mirrors, and Participants: Design Lenses for Sociomateriality in Engineering Organizations

08/15/2020
by   Edward Burnell, et al.
0

When you use a computer it also uses you, and in that relationship forms a new entity of melded agencies, a "centaur" inseparably human and nonhuman. Networks of interaction in an organization similarly form "organizational centaurs", melding humans, technologies, and organizations into an inseparable sociomateriality. By developing a convex optimization toolkit for conceptual engineering we sought to shape these centaurs. How do organizations go from a high-level concept ("let's make an airplane") to a "design", and in that process what blurred lines between humans and computers bring opportunities for research? We present three metaphors that have been useful lenses across our field sites: considering design models as maps shows how centaurs apportioned legitimacy; looking at design models as mirrors illuminates how they sought validation in their perspectives; and treating design models as participants recognizes their opinions and agency as equivalent to other entities in these centaurs.

READ FULL TEXT

page 1

page 2

page 4

page 7

research
10/26/2021

Software Engineering Meets Systems Engineering: Conceptual Modeling Applied to Engineering Operations

Models are fundamentally crucial to many scientific fields, including so...
research
03/27/2023

Would the Trees Dim the Lights? Adopting the Intentional Stance for More-Than-Human Participatory Design

The 2019/20 Black Summer bushfires in Australia demonstrated the brutal ...
research
12/08/2017

Computer Interfaces to Organizations: Perspectives on Borg-Human Interaction Design

We use the term borg to refer to the complex organizations composed of p...
research
08/17/2023

Towards an Effective Organization-Wide Bulk Email System

Bulk email is widely used in organizations to communicate messages to em...
research
07/06/2021

Sensemaking in Cybersecurity Incident Response: The Interplay of Organizations, Technology and Individuals

Sensemaking is a critical activity in organizations. It is a process thr...
research
05/01/2020

Workgroup Mapping: Visual Analysis of Collaboration Culture

The digital transformation of work presents new opportunities to underst...
research
02/22/2023

Multi-Objective Personalization in Multi-Stakeholder Organizational Bulk E-mail: A Field Experiment

Bulk email is often used in organizations to communicate “important-to-o...

Please sign up or login with your details

Forgot password? Click here to reset