IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - Spring 2014 - 31

Fig. 1. affective conditioning system: interface for self-organization of workplace rules.

Design Contractualism
Design Contractualism [18] is the idea that the system
designers should make moral, legal, ethical, or prosocial judgements and encode such judgements in the
system. It can be seen, for example, as one of the seven
foundational principles of privacy by Design [19],
whereby privacy is embedded in the design. In this way
it becomes a default non-functional requirement of any
IT systems architecture and design. However, for social
networking platforms for socio-technical systems, the
challenge is to raise this to "ethics by design," requiring
that a whole range of ethical and pro-social judgements
are designed into the system. Such judgements include
Ostrom's institutional design principles.
An example of this design method is "Meet the
Meter" [20], a serious game for SmartGrids, which
attempts to ensure by design that the conceptual foundations of Ostrom's institutional design principles are
perceptually prominent in the interface of a socio-technical system for infrastructure management. This game
is concerned with trying to leverage active participation through demand-side self-organization using an
innovative user-infrastructure interface. For example,
one interface we have designed sets users (players) a
number of tasks to perform using specific electrical
appliances over a period of time. However, if everyone
switches everything on at once then the system can be
overloaded and cuts out. players therefore have to use
the social networking interface to arrange their individual actions to support synchronized effort, and to get
positive feedback from their individual contribution to
collective success through in-game achievements and
IEEE TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIETY MAGAZINE

SprING 2014

rewards (see Fig. 2). Specifically, we are using social
capital acquired through individual contributions to the
community, in order to encourage pro-active, pro-social
behavior. In particular, we want to feed back the idea
that a user's (small, individual) action X contributed to
a (large, collective) action Y that had a beneficial effect
Z (e.g., avoiding a power cut).
Collective Awareness
Collective Awareness [21] is the common knowledge
that is formed from within a community, as a consequence of social networking, meso-level structuration,
and planned emergence in complex social ensembles,
rather than as a reaction to external events. Meso-level
structuration is concerned with the self-organized formation, interoperation, adaptation, innovation, and
dissolution of institutions for conventional action
and agreement of micro-level actors who are aiming
to achieve planned emergence. planned emergence
entails the introspective use of meso-level structures to
coordinate and influence micro-level beliefs, actions
and interactions in the intentional pursuit of desired
or desirable macro-level outcomes (or to avoid undesirable outcomes), for example in social innovation,
community resilience, and sustainability. planned
emergence is a property of complex social ensembles,
which are formed by groups of both ICT-enabled individuals and intelligent devices brought together for
some collective purpose, whose underpinning principles are multi-functional micro-level components (the
ability to perform different functions in different contexts) and their ability to form meso-level structures.
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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - Spring 2014