Abstract

Historically the technical centered approach was criticized because of its propensity to create technical objects without considering their future use. The user centered approach seeks for better understanding the users, their practice and the environment (including organization and institutional aspects) in order to take all these factors into account from the first stage of a tool design. The design of the socio-technical system is itself a socio-technical activity, one of the important tasks of it being the organization of the involvement of users at each phase of the design project. This is a participatory approach to design. On a whole this approach can be considered as a research action, implying the constant follow-up of the design process and the progressive analysis of users needs, of changes in their work habits, of the occurred problems as well as different recommendations proposed by users. The practical part of our article illustrates the concepts of participatory design approach that we applied to the design of the graphical web browser NESTOR. This tool helps to construct meaningful information from the "raw data" one's get access on the web.

Citation

Reggers, T., Khamidoullina, I. & Zeiliger, R. (2001). Participatory Approach to Design of Socio-Technical Systems. In C. Montgomerie & J. Viteli (Eds.), Proceedings of ED-MEDIA 2001--World Conference on Educational Multimedia, Hypermedia & Telecommunications (pp. 1538-1539). Norfolk, VA USA: Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education (AACE). Retrieved August 11, 2024 from https://www.learntechlib.org/primary/p/8535/.

© 2001 Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education (AACE)