Changing Perspectives and a Changing World – Humans at the Centre of Socio-Technical Systems Development

Our world continues to change at a fast pace. Machines, humans, interaction, and space continue to change. Technology continues to play a crucial role in our daily life. Humans are a no longer passive consumer of digital systems but co-creators and co-builders. Beyond the system’s interface, we are also operating in an “interspace” inhabited by people, computers, and other devices, in a "complex web of interactions". The human-computer interaction (HCI) field employs a multidisciplinary approach towards designing, evaluating, and implementing interactive systems for human use. The needs and expectations of the end-users have to be significantly factored into the development of interactive systems. To achieve this, HCI uses techniques borrowed from computer science, psychology, sociology, and ethnology among others to collect, analyze, interpret users' data and incorporate the results in the product design for product creation. At the same time, we are in effect creating new worlds when we create new products. Socio-technical systems development must not only be technically-driven, but must take into account the social context of the process of a product, and service creation. For this reason, the user-centred design approach has become a norm for successful system development. In this presentation, I will share the case of Europeana Media. Europeana Media uses the user-centred design approach to gather user requirements, plan, analyze, design, and evaluate the product