Semi-Automating (or not) a Socio-Technical Method for Socio-Technical Systems

How can we support software professionals who want to build human-adaptive sociotechnical systems? Building such systems requires skills some developers may lack, such as applying human-centric concepts to the software they develop and/or mentally modeling other people. Effective socio-technical met...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in2018 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (VL/HCC) pp. 23 - 32
Main Authors Mendez, Christopher, Hanson, Zoe Steine, Oleson, Alannah, Horvath, Amber, Hill, Charles, Hilderbrand, Claudia, Sarma, Anita, Burnett, Margaret
Format Conference Proceeding
LanguageEnglish
Published IEEE 01.10.2018
Subjects
Buildings
Computers
gender inclusiveness
GenderMag
socio-technical
Sociotechnical systems
Software
Task analysis
Visualization
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Summary:How can we support software professionals who want to build human-adaptive sociotechnical systems? Building such systems requires skills some developers may lack, such as applying human-centric concepts to the software they develop and/or mentally modeling other people. Effective socio-technical methods exist to help, but most are manual and cognitively burdensome. In this paper, we investigate ways semi-automating a socio-technical method might help, using as our lens GenderMag, a method that requires people to mentally model people with genders different from their own. Toward this end, we created the GenderMag Recorder's Assistant, a semi-automated visual tool, and conducted a small field study and a 92-participant controlled study. Results of our investigation revealed ways the tool helped with cognitive load and ways it did not; unforeseen advantages of the tool in increasing participants' engagement with the method; and a few unforeseen advantages of the manual approach as well.
ISSN:1943-6106
DOI:10.1109/VLHCC.2018.8506514