ABSTRACT
A bounded sociotechnical experiments (BSTE) can provide an opportunity for testing the feasibility of a new technology or service before it is ready to enter the open market. It can develop and test new social arrangements among actors and consider them as templates for other societal contexts. This chapter examines the learning processes in the design of a building with zero greenhouse-gas emissions, located in Boston, Massachusetts. A BSTE is driven by a long-term and large-scale vision though the vision need not be equally shared by its participants. Its goal is to try out innovative approaches for solving larger societal problems of unsustainable technologies and services. One way to facilitate learning toward sociotechnical system change is through small-scale experiments aimed at developing, testing and introducing new technologies and services. The chapter presents a framework for monitoring higher-order learning in a heterogeneous team of professionals and for enhancing such learning in particular settings, which we denote as bounded sociotechnical experiments.
