IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - September 2017 - 75

parameterization and responses, and a set number of
redundant components. Human engineers from the
ground are sometimes able to use the existing instrumentation and other components in astoundingly creative ways in order to regain some losses in functionality,
but often at considerable cost in terms of recovery time
and loss to the overall mission. Socially-sensitive systems
design can help us reevaluate how we are using the current interfaces, instrumentation, and communications
that we have in complex systems such as this. For example, how could early social processes, such as additional
external perspective and viewpoints, be used to improve
the fault detection of one subsystem through the feedback from other interacting systems? Could concepts of
trust be used to supplement the current approaches to
switching to redundant components?
In cases such as this, groups of individuals can use
social organization, values, and relations to move themselves as a group to a better position to be able to deal
with these factors. In doing so, the group builds what we
call social potential. This is not the same as social
potential identified in [34], but is more closely related to
social capital, in the spirit of how Fukuyama [19] sees it.
Without social concepts explicitly embedded in a system and its decision-making processes, there will be a
lack of primitives with which to reason about the system's social state, and increased social potential cannot
be explicitly targeted.
One example of this in the human sphere is a football team who, while they may not be under immediate
attack from the opposition, nor know what form such
an attack may take, apply organization (in the form of
roles and positions), values (e.g., solidarity, respect,
fairness, and loyalty [33]), and relations [22] to put
themselves in a better position to deal with such an
attack, when it comes. On a longer timescale, such
social positioning in football teams has been found not
only to increase the potential for success within the
specific game or even within the group itself, but to
even generalize to future individual life events, such as
professional success [21].
In a technical example, in ad hoc wireless networks,
we have built in methods for making the devices aware
of their nearest neighbors, with some communication
and with some reasoning about how best to combine
current capabilities (for power or for load balancing).
But to what extent can we use the team analogy here,
for example adding in the notion of a team player - to
have devices that could act altruistically for the good of
the whole network, or protectively and proactively for
the good of each other?
More broadly, if we want a system of systems to integrate adaptively and intelligently, then we may be aided
by thinking not only about the social processes that
SEPTEMBER 2017

∕

help build trust (which is already being looked at widely), but those that help mediate and resolve differences,
that learn from previous failures and grievances, and
so forth [3].

Socially-sensitive systems design
can help us reevaluate how we
are using the current interfaces,
instrumentation, and communications
that we have in complex systems.

The rise of socio-technical systems and their weaving
into the fabric of human social interaction means that
such values will be ever more important. Indeed, we
even venture as far as to argue that such an approach is
not only desirable, it is essential to preserve the intrinsic richness and value of human social interaction, as
technical systems are increasingly interwoven into our
everyday lives. To do otherwise, would be to degrade
the quality of the human experience in a socio-technical world.

State of the Art and Challenges
In order to make progress towards socially-sensitive
systems design, it will be useful to be able to more formally describe, analyze and hence understand the
impact of different forms of social value, alongside the
role of various forms of social relation, in socio-technical systems.
Of course, we are far from the first to attempt to
tackle problems of rapid adaptivity in unpredictably
dynamic and uncertain environments. There is now an
expansive literature in the fields of multi-agent, selfadaptive, and self-organizing systems, computational
intelligence, and artificial life, that describes mechanisms to engender or manage collective adaptivity.
Indeed, some of this is directly inspired by social systems found in nature, such as colonies of ants and
bees, flocks of birds, and schools of fish, while some is
inspired by human societies, such as those based on
norms and institutions.
Despite this, there is very little consideration in this literature, or the approaches it describes, of deeper aspects
of social relations or social value. In order to approach a
formalization of such concepts, we can instead turn to
sociology and psychology, where pre-formal theories of
human social relations can inform the development of

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