In this episode of What That Means, Camille gets the definition, meaning, and importance of socio-technical systems from Intel Fellow and Chief Architect of socio-technical Systems, Maria Bezaitis.
The conversation covers important questions like:
Why does the overlap of social and tech matter?
How does it impact how we should be thinking about security and product design?
...and more! Don’t miss it!
Here are some key take-aways:
While socio-technical isn’t a new term or concept, it is new to tech.
For most of the developed world, social and tech are inextricably linked.
The brevity of some interactions (like those in the IOT space) is not new. What the Internet and the tech evolution have done is increase the diversity and depth of those encounters.
We love cities because they allow for more chance encounters, more shared experiences. But now, many of those chance encounters, those shared experiences, are happening online. We’re sort of co-creating worlds.
With the younger generations, there’s less of a distinction between the online world and the ‘real’ world. There’s less consideration given to what gets shared online vs. what remains offline. They see the link between social and tech much more clearly and the two are virtually inseparable in their minds.
We want to believe security and privacy can be concepts with fixed rules and regulations. But humans show us it’s not that simple. We’re constantly making trade-offs. So, what we need are real-time, responsive solutions.
We can no longer only think about what’s best for tech or driving tech forward. When making decisions, product design engineers need to think more and more about who they’re designing the product for and how it will be used.
Some interesting quotes from today’s episode:“The phrase has been used for years in areas like organizational design and workplace research. I'm bringing it to the fore for tech in part because our lives are no longer strictly social, nor are they exclusively focused around technology. And yet, technology companies, I think, are still working towards the importance of that intersection.”
“When we're talking and thinking about technical and technical requirements, we really need to understand the social as inextricably linked. And when we look at our own lives as social entities on the planet, it's really hard, at least if you're in a lot of the developed world, to really think about them as somehow without technology or outside of technology.”
“Which is to say, there are layers to this problem. Individuals exist in contexts, which include places and environments and other people. And technologies do as well. In order to understand how these things evolve, we really need to be looking at the intersection and the coevolution of people together with technology.”
“If you happen to have teenagers at home, which I do, you know that the people that they're interacting with aren't just people that they know.”
“This is why we love cities, because cities have always been these incredible environments for chance encounters, and for very quickly moving us into places and into moments that somehow are not foreseen by the trajectory of our lives.”
“That early moment of a potential for something new, and a potential for encountering something different, was absolutely present and important. And actually, I think that in some respects, we're likely to encounter that again, as more and more parts of our lives are sourced from what we're doing online.”
“I grew up in the 70s, and 80s, and we still operate with this notion that our lives are better without tech. There is a fundamental assumption that it's important to tell your child to park the device, put it away. That it's important to imagine leisure time or time off from technology. I don't think that that's mirrored at all in younger generations. And I'm not sure that's just because they’re teens or preteens. Technology is occupying a very different kind of terrain for them.”
“Their world is organized around communities and places and activities that are sourced from a digital world. And of course, COVID has deepened all of that for them.”
“I think we still see people making all sorts of trade-offs against privacy all the time. What we know for sure, is that privacy has never been and will likely never be a concept or a practice that has fixed rules and protocols for people. We are always negotiating our privacy in the same way that we're always negotiating our security, which is what makes humans and communities of humans a really great place to look for thinking differently about both privacy and security. Technologists would like to think that those things lend themselves very easily to rules and guidelines and regulations. I think humans show us that it's not that simple.”
“Once you remove yourself from the mindset that privacy or security is something that can be fixed – that can be defined and then implemented – and you move into this space where you can think about those concepts as much more dynamic and much more responsive, then I think you enter into a space where you're really thinking differently about the kinds of technologies that might make sense.”
“You're not mapping technologies anymore to behaviors or workloads that are fixed or rigid, but you're able to maybe identify vulnerabilities and holes in a much more responsive, real-time manner. And that, I think, creates space for thinking about change quickly, and in real time.”
“I'd like to see ethics move in the same vein that we're trying to move social research, which is that it's not something that ultimately lives outside. It doesn't necessarily require extra processes and tools and governing boards, but that it becomes much more integral. And I think anyone working in that space today would say that's exactly what we're trying to get done. But just like the general face of social science work in product development, and in tech specifically, that's going to take some time.”
“I think our job as researchers who are working in the tech sector, is to make sure that those conversations have a landing zone, to bring them inside our companies, and then work with the right partners inside our companies to change how things get made.”