1 © 2012 Volker Wulf, University of Siegen Building a Socially Embedded Future Internet - Some Research Challenges Volker Wulf University of Siegen and Fraunhofer FIT European Society for Socially Embedded Technologies (EUSSET)

2 © 2012 Volker Wulf, University of Siegen Future Internet: A Socio- technical System l Internet and its applications are becoming an infrastructure for all/different aspects of life l The quality of IT design lies finally in its transformative impacts on social practices »… „to ‘augment’ lives, work, business and spaces in ways that add value” ….. (FIA roadmap) l FIA Roadmap describes societal and business challenges »“The Future Internet is not just a technological, but a socio ‐ technical system” (FIA roadmap) »however: research agenda still lacks an IT design-oriented linkage between the social and the technical »however: work program, especially sections 6.1 and 6.2 (business and societal applications): mainly technical targets »Human Computer Interaction: focus on technical mechanisms

3 © 2012 Volker Wulf, University of Siegen Understanding and Designing Social-Embedded Technologies l Research vision: Support / augment social practices instead of pure automatization l Basic approach: Grounding IT research in an analysis of (IT enhanced) social practices l Bringing together »Understanding of existing social practices »Design of innovative technologies »Unterstanding the transformative impacts towards ‚augmented‘ practices and social innovations l Insights are situated and require a new approach of careful generalizations l Traditional CS methods do not take the social embeddedness of technologies sufficiently into account

4 © 2012 Volker Wulf, University of Siegen Design Case Studies: Understanding IT-augmented Practices l Design Case Studies »Empirical analysis of given practices in a specific field of application, »(Participatory) Design of an innovative ICT artifact related to the findings of the empirical analysis »Investigation into the appropriation of the ICT artifact over a longer period of time. l Definition describes an ideal type of studies, fragments are often interesting, interleaving temporal order of phases Prestudy Design Appropriation

5 © 2012 Volker Wulf, University of Siegen Understanding Navigation Practices of Firefighters  Intense work with firefighters  Paris firefighters  Cologne firefighters  Empirical Prestudies  Semi-structured Interviews  Participatory Observation  Problem: Navigation in buildings

6 © 2012 Volker Wulf, University of Siegen Landmarks: Supporting firefighters‘ navigation practises

7 © 2012 Volker Wulf, University of Siegen Design Explorations

8 © 2012 Volker Wulf, University of Siegen Design Case Studies in Specific Application Domains End User Develop ment Security & Privacy Cross-cutting Issue: Concept building Health & Aging Sustain- ability Smart Cities & Communities Knowledge Work Pro- sumption

9 © 2012 Volker Wulf, University of Siegen Proposal for a Research Line l Extending Living Labs in the real world in a practice- based manner »Cooperative work and coordination in different industries / services »Multinational supply chains »Energy production, distribution, and consumption »….. l Building a corpus of design case studies l Comparative analysis for (situated) design principles and augmentation moves /changes in practices l Findings on the application layer needs to interact with research on technological infrastructure

10 © 2012 Volker Wulf, University of Siegen Europe: Competitive Strengths l Europe has a strong intellectual tradition to ground the field »Philosophical foundations: Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Latour »Tradition of Socio-technical Systems »Scandinavian movement of Participatory Design l Sophisticated practices in knowledge-based, highly competitive organizations l Evolutionary model of innovation in organizations l (Mayor) Industrial players engaging in practices- based computing »Philipps, SAP, PSI, Pixelpark, itsme, ….

11 © 2012 Volker Wulf, University of Siegen Additional Materials

12 © 2012 Volker Wulf, University of Siegen Infrastructuring: Toward an Integrated Perspective on the Design and Use of Information Technology ( Pipek/Wulf 2009)

13 © 2012 Volker Wulf, University of Siegen Knowledge building in a situated research approach l Current state of the art »Theories and concepts without evaluation and scope of validity »Accumulation of (design) case studies without knowledge building on top of them l (Design) case studies within a constructionist paradigm »Linked to specific practices and IT design options »Case studies offer thick descriptions »Situated in specific context l Theory and concept building is through comparison of multiple cases (corpus of studies)

14 © 2012 Volker Wulf, University of Siegen Domains of Research with Societal Relevance l Internationally competitive production systems: technologies and work organization l Ecological production and consumption of energy and raw materials l Aging society: health care and social caring l New forms of political participation and democratic legitimation l New forms of multinational cooperation and economical regulation l Migration: integration and reference to home community l Issues of specific developmental needs: Agriculture, raw material production, education, health, global cooperation

15 © 2012 Volker Wulf, University of Siegen Research Challenges l Practices are hidden, partly digitalized, complex, developing l Design: creatively linked to practices l Technologies: design space is influenced by history of their emergence l Appropriation: creatively inspired by innovative technological artefacts and transformativly linked to given practice l Changes in practice: driven by multitude of factors l Conceptual and theoretical problems- competition rather than cooperation

16 © 2012 Volker Wulf, University of Siegen Europe: Institutional Problems l EU-IST FP 7 (and 8?) does not provide much funding for EUSSET domains »Periperal work packages in a large variety of domains »Lacking funding in topic areas central to the community »National funding schemes work operate similarly l Cooperation between academia and IT industries and IT user (organizations) does not work perfectly »European funding model ‚in theory‘ perfectly suited but needs some improvements »Better schemes and techniques required to bridge the gap between very different communities pf practice

17 © 2012 Volker Wulf, University of Siegen Europe: Institutional Problems - 2 l European academic conferences suffer from international competition »Less submissions »Smaller participation »Missing plattform for publication, other than (expensive) commercial publishers or (US-dominated) ACM-DL l European academic community »Segregated and distributed across different fields, little shared discourse »Stagnating in size and ageing core actors

18 © 2012 Volker Wulf, University of Siegen Open Issues: Academically l Looking for an appropritate research and design paradigm for the EUSSET community »Bridging between technological innovation and ethnographical depth l Building knowledge in a situated design community: issue of transferability beyond cases l Bridging among disciplines l Opening towards practitioners