ABSTRACT
Conventional approaches to design, which focused on technology and its wide application, often resulted in systems that were at best half-heartedly embraced by user communities and more often than not begrudgingly obligated into adoption. To overcome such shortcomings, system design and the individuals who contribute to this activity have evolved to reflect the salient concerns of successive eras. The engineer as the principal designer has evolved into a team of designers including psychologists, social scientists and anthropologists (Squires and Byrne 2002). The concerns of design have also transformed from those focused solely on the central design concerns of functionality and usability to more “border issues,” i.e. design variables that reflect socially constructed and maintained world views which both drive and constrain how people can and will react to and interact with a system or its elements. Socially centered design is a medial-ergonomic design that fills the void between traditional system centered design (i.e. macro-ergonomic design of the overall organization and work system structure, as well as process interfaces with the system’s environment, people and technology) and contemporary user centered design (i.e. micro-ergonomic design of specific jobs and related human-machine, human-environment, and user system or software interfaces) (Stanney et al. 1997). Specifically, socially centered design takes a holistic approach to design, broadening the narrowly defined technical focus of past design approaches by considering users, as their performance is influenced by their knowledge and understanding of the social context in which they perform their work. Following this design approach, naturalistic observation of human behavior as it is influenced by situational, contextual and social factors is used to assist in the formulation of system designs.
