ABSTRACT
Intellectual teamwork is an increasingly important segment of white collar work, and information system designers are working to create technologies that will help groups perform more effectively. However, creating practical information technology requires not only technical expertise, but also an understanding of the social and behavioral processes that the technology is designed to support. Social science knowledge about groups and organizations could be extremely valuable in designing tools to help people communicate and structure their work, yet this knowledge is underused. This chapter presents reasons for that underuse and suggests that, to avoid reproducing these difficulties in new technological domains, social scientists should become actively and directly involved in design.
