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As a young class of socio‐technical systems, Augmented Reality (AR), which enriches the real world with virtual information, is becoming increasingly important. It offers a variety of possibilities in the areas of education and training. Here, interactive and immersive learning experiences increase motivation and learning success. AR also enables the specific support of workers in the production environment. When dealing with complex tasks, AR applications help workers to increase efficiency and quality. Based on the developments of the BMBF collaborative project KORESIL, this paper contains an overview of the current application scenarios of AR in teaching and industry. The outlook provides an analysis of this technology's potential and identifies current challenges in hard‐ and software. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Voice Intelligent Assistants provide users with new ways of human-computer interaction. With built-in screens, Voice Intelligent Assistants can display images and videos upon users' requests. Even though images and videos present information in a lively manner, they might also contain overwhelming harmful contents. Due to the lack of effective evaluation mechanisms, it is difficult to prevent the propagation of harmful contents while ensuring the dissemination of compliant visual contents. This research defined a standardized set of classification criteria to identify and classify harmful visual contents. Then, Intelligent Image and Video Rating System, a prototype rating system that implemented the classification criteria was designed and developed. This research further evaluated and verified the reliability and efficiency of the prototype. The prototype system demonstrated additional advantages in swiftly classifying new hazardous contents, and in differentiating the multiple meanings of the same object in different contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The metaverse represents a post-reality universe that seamlessly merges physical reality with digital virtuality. It provides a continuous and immersive social networking environment, enabling multi-user engagement and interaction through Extended Reality (XR) technologies, which include Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR), and Mixed Reality (MR). As a novel solution distinct from traditional methods such as mobile-based applications, the technical affordance of XR technologies in shaping multi-user social experiences remains a complex, multifaceted, and multivariate issue that has not yet been thoroughly explored. Additionally, there is a notable absence of mature frameworks and guidelines for designing and developing these multi-user socio-technical systems. Enhancing multi-user social engagement through these technologies remains a significant research challenge. This systematic review aims to address this gap by establishing an analytical framework guided by the PRISMA protocol. It analyzes 88 studies from various disciplines, including computer science, social science, psychology, and the arts, to define the mechanisms and effectiveness of XR technologies in multi-user social engagement. Quantitative methods such as descriptive statistics, correlation statistics, and text mining are used to examine the manifestation of mechanisms, potential system factors, and their effectiveness. Meanwhile, qualitative case studies identify specific measures by which system factors enhance multi-user social engagement. The study provides a pioneering framework for theoretical research and offers practical insights for developing cross-spatiotemporal co-present activities in the metaverse. It also promotes critical reflection on the evolving relationship between humans and this emerging digital universe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the recent renewed interest in AI, the field has made substantial advancements, particularly in generative systems. Increased computational power and the availability of very large datasets has enabled systems such as ChatGPT to effectively replicate aspects of human social interactions, such as verbal communication, thus bringing about profound changes in society. In this paper, we explain that the arrival of generative AI systems marks a shift from ‘interacting through’ to ‘interacting with’ technologies and calls for a reconceptualization of socio-technical systems as we currently understand them. We dub this new generation of socio-technical systems synthetic to signal the increased interactions between human and artificial agents, and, in the footsteps of philosophers of information, we cash out agency in terms of ‘poiêsis’. We close the paper with a discussion of the potential policy implications of synthetic socio-technical system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study explores a design fiction approach in an educational context by applying it to a third-year industrial design studio class. The Food Futures project is conducted with thirty students in the design studio. We approached the future of food using a design fiction approach since the combination of food and design is a highly complex and social issue that requires a systems-level change. The project started with a design fiction workshop to adapt the approach to the class. After the students had written their briefs in the context of the future storyworlds, the project continued with weekly critique sessions. The data is collected through the project outcomes, recordings, and questionnaires. A methodological discussion about using this approach in the educational context is presented based on the collected reflections. We argue that design fiction can be used in studio projects for research and idea-generation phases to support divergence processes through building storyworlds. Furthermore, we examined how this approach can be integrated into design education based on how students defined their limitations considering their visualisation techniques and design intervention levels (product, product-service-system, spatio-social) within future storyworlds. Imbued with the ability to envision socio-technical environments, we see design fiction as a useful tool for adapting industrial design education to emerging approaches such as systemic design and transition design. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Voting Advice Applications (VAAs) are interactive tools used to assist in one’s choice of a party or candidate to vote for in an upcoming election. They have the potential to increase citizens’ trust and participation in democratic structures. However, there is no established ground truth for one’s electoral choice, and VAA recommendations depend strongly on architectural and design choices. We assessed several representative European VAAs according to the Ethics Guidelines for Trustworthy AI provided by the European Commission using publicly available information. We found scores to be comparable across VAAs and low in most requirements, with differences reflecting the kind of developing institution. Across VAAs, we identify the need for improvement in (i) transparency regarding the subjectivity of recommendations, (ii) diversity of stakeholder participation, (iii) user-centric documentation of algorithm, and (iv) disclosure of the underlying values and assumptions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Content on the World Wide Web that is not indexable by standard search engines defines a category called the deep Web. Dark networks are a subset of the deep Web. They provide services of great interest to users who seek online anonymity during their search on the Internet. Tor is the most widely used dark network around the world. It requires unique application layer protocols and authorization schemes to access. The present evidence reveals that in spite of great efforts to investigate Tor, our understanding is limited to the work on either the information or structure of this network. Also, interplay between information and structure that plays an important role in evaluating socio-technical systems including Tor has not been given the attention it deserves. In this article, we review and classify the present work on Tor to improve our understanding of this network and shed light on the new directions to evaluate Tor. The related work can be categorized into proposals that (1) study the security and privacy on Tor, (2) characterize Tor's structure, (3) evaluate the information hosted on Tor, and (4) review the related work on Tor from 2014 to the present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How can strategic decision-making be reinforced through reliable forecasts of technological change? Observations of strategic forecasts have shown that they mainly rely upon expert opinions. To turn these opinions into consistent knowledge about the future, we need to manage cognitive biases using provable models. Observed forecasting methods provide useful tools for exploiting expert knowledge and data, but management of cognitive bias remains underdeveloped. To improve the situation with cognitive biases in technology forecasting, the Researching Future method (RFm) offers a mixed methods approach. This article introduces RFm, a method that combines a problem-based approach and a logistic function, unified by an applied resources paradigm. A practical case study is described to illustrate and validate RFm, and the results, limitations, and perspectives of RFm are then examined. The article contributes to the technology forecasting methodology and is of interest to copper mining technology R&D specialists, among others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Each critical infrastructure and vital service represents a unique instance of a complex socio-technical–economic system. Resilience in complex systems is an emergent behaviour that occurs from interactions between components and is not easily predictable from understanding each component in isolation. Yet, cybersecurity practice and maturity models still focus on the robustness of separate components: organizational units, firms, or IT applications. Such a fundamental mismatch between theory and tools is among the causes of pervasive cyber insecurity. We introduce the sectoral capability maturity model to enable a comprehensive improvement of systemic resilience. The promoting global cyber resilience for sectors cyber-capability maturity model incorporates the science of complex systems, cybersecurity frameworks, and two decades of CIP operations experience. The model was successfully applied in resilience assessment projects in a dozen countries. Real-life experience emphasizes the benefits of the sectoral approach to cyber resilience: creating feedback loops within the sector, integrating supply chain and third-party risks, facilitating information flows between stakeholders, enabling cooperation with and among ministries, departments and other authorities, weighting in the links and processes between actors in cybersecurity issues. The established value of the sectoral approach calls for applications that will improve the resilience of essential services while lowering sector-wide cybersecurity expenditures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Interaction-free usage (IfU) will be one of the quantitatively dominant forms of computer use in the future. In qualitative terms, this form of use will cover a wide range of applications, also software that supports communication and cooperation. Digital twins for cooperation and communication will be employed by individual users to maintain a variety of social networking activities. Generative AI will play a decisive role in this development, autonomously identifying user needs, replacing the predominant form of use through prompting with question-and-answer dialogs. These dialogs will also be used to preconfigure systems for IfU phases. The counterpart to IfU, which will become ever less-frequent, is intervening interaction, when users intervene to explore and adjust the performance of AI-based systems in exceptional situations or to optimize them for future task handling.

The study of emergency or crisis management practices acquires strategical relevance for resilient decision‐making under uncertainty. The assessment of system resilience is an asset to identify potential design or operational improvements of a complex socio‐technical system, such as an Emergency Management (EM) system. This research aims at analyzing the functional properties of an EM system recurring to a novel integration of the Functional Resonance Analysis Method (FRAM) and Bayesian Belief Networks (BBN). The FRAM is used to model and display the actors and the interactions in the system, while the BBN, dynamically updated when new data becomes available, supports a complementary quantitative assessment. The methodology is iterated in the analysis of an EM procedure, issued by a second‐line Emergency Response organization for Oil and Gas (O&G) operators in Norwegian continental shelf. The results of the study show that the proposed stochastic methodology compensates the drawbacks of traditional FRAM modeling, via the outcomes of BBN quantitative analyses. The findings, contextualized in EM, can be transferred to different socio‐technical contexts, both military and civil ones. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The role of explanations in intelligent systems has in the last few years entered the spotlight as AI-based solutions appear in an ever-growing set of applications. Though data-driven (or machine learning) techniques are often used as examples of how opaque (also called black box) approaches can lead to problems such as bias and general lack of explainability and interpretability, in reality these features are difficult to tame in general, even for approaches that are based on tools typically considered to be more amenable, like knowledge-based formalisms. In this paper, we continue a line of research and development towards building tools that facilitate the implementation of explainable and interpretable hybrid intelligent socio-technical systems, focusing on features that users can leverage to build explanations to their queries. In particular, we present the implementation of a recently-proposed application framework (and make available its source code) for developing such systems, and explore user-centered mechanisms for building explanations based both on the kinds of explanations required (such as counterfactual, contextual, etc.) and the inputs used for building them (coming from various sources, such as the knowledge base and lower-level data-driven modules). In order to validate our approach, we develop two use cases, one as a running example for detecting hate speech in social platforms and the other as an extension that also contemplates cyberbullying scenarios. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research sought to develop a structured methodology for transferring resilience resources and safety innovation across industrial sectors, specifically, from aviation to maritime. As transportation sectors struggle to adapt to new economic realities and seek to prosper in new operational contexts there is a need to preserve resources and invest in change initiatives which will derive meaningful impact. A structured methodology to guide a principled transfer of safety solutions across sectors would be a sustainable method of improving the resilience of the sector. An action research approach was adopted. A five-step methodology was developed in cooperation with three maritime organisations to identify challenges and resilience resources from aviation which could be feasibly transferred and implemented. Five steps were identified as being key to a principled transfer of resilience resources from aviation to maritime. They were as follows: (1) industry comparison and database of aviation resilience resources; (2) maritime user needs and gap analysis, and resilience resources evaluation and selection; (3) scenarios production and resources mapping onto scenarios; (4) feasibility analysis; and (5) implementation plan. The results highlight the utility of combining bottom-up (identifying problems) and top-down (identifying a database of resources) approaches at the outset. A comprehensive workshop-based feasibility analysis is also key to ensuring the identified resources can be effectively implemented in the destination sector. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Large-scale public sector information systems (PSIS) that administer social welfare payments face considerable challenges. Between 2014 and 2023, an Australian government agency conceived and implemented the Online Compliance Intervention (OCI) scheme, widely referred to as Robodebt. The scheme's primary purpose was to apply digital transformation in order to reduce labour costs and increase recovery of overpayments. Among its key features were a simplified, but inherently erroneous, estimation method called income averaging, and a new requirement that welfare recipients produce documentation for income earned years earlier. Failure by welfare recipients to comply with mandates resulted in the agency recovering what it asserted to be overpayments. This article presents a case study of Robodebt and its effects on over 1 million of its clients. The detailed case study relies on primary data through Senate and other government hearings and commissions, and secondary data, such as media reports, supplemented by academic sources. Relevant technical features include (1) the reliance on the digital persona that the agency maintains for each client, (2) computer-performed inferencing from client data, and (3) automated decision-making and subsequent action. This article employs a socio-technical systems approach to understanding the factors underlying a major PSIS project failure, by focusing on the system's political and public service sponsors; its participants (users); the people affected by it (usees); and the broader economic, social, and political context. Practical and theoretical insights are presented, with the intention of highlighting major practical lessons for PSIS, and the relevance of an articulated socio-technical frame for PSIS.

Abstract The same individuals can express very different emotions in online social media with respect to face-to-face interactions, partially because of intrinsic limitations of the digital environments and partially because of their algorithmic design, which is optimized to maximize engagement. Such differences become even more pronounced for topics concerning socially sensitive and polarizing issues, such as massive pharmaceutical interventions. Here, we investigate how online emotional responses change during the large-scale COVID-19 vaccination campaign with respect to a baseline in which no specific contentious topic dominates. We show that the online discussions during the pandemic generate a vast spectrum of emotional response compared to the baseline, especially when we take into account the characteristics of the users and the type of information shared in the online platform. Furthermore, we analyze the role of the political orientation of shared news, whose circulation seems to be driven not only by their actual informational content but also by the social need to strengthen one’s affiliation to, and positioning within, a specific online community by means of emotionally arousing posts. Our findings stress the importance of better understanding the emotional reactions to contentious topics at scale from digital signatures, while providing a more quantitative assessment of the ongoing online social dynamics to build a faithful picture of offline social implications.

AbstractThe surge in popularity of e-commerce live streaming is evident among sellers and consumers. However, a holistic examination of the influencing factors of consumers’ purchase intention from the perspective of social and technical systems is still limited. Utilizing the socio-technical systems theory, we investigate the effects of social and technical system factors on consumers’ flow experience and how flow affects consumer purchase intention in the live streaming setting. Furthermore, we identify how optimal stimulation level moderates the relationship between socio-technical system factors and flow. Empirical results (N = 355) indicate that flow can be strengthened through social system factors (financial bonds, social bonds) and technical system factors (visibility, guidance shopping), consequently affecting consumer purchase intention. In terms of the moderating effects, the optimal stimulation level positively moderates the relationships between social bonds, visibility, guidance shopping, and flow. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the learning and performance of the air traffic control (ATC) work domain. This domain was chosen because it embodies features that represent future work for many other industries (e.g., information service provision mediated by information technologies; a high reliance on communication skills and collaborative work; increasing complexity and intensity of the work activity), within an organisational context undergoing considerable change. In ATC work learning occurs formally as part of accredited training and informally, as part of everyday practice. In this way learning and experience of ATC work shapes – and is shaped by – the way work is organised, which includes the divisions of labour and technological artefacts. ATC work is experienced temporally, complexly, through affect and socially. Controllers learn to use a variety of socio-material resources which include embodiment and artefacts to undertake the work. In so doing the article demonstrates the ways in which learning and performance is not just a cognitive undertaking, but one that draws on embodiment to achieve what here is called "interdependent sentience". This involves using all their senses to gain an awareness of problems as they emerge to collectively accomplish a seamless air traffic flow in a complex interdependent socio-technical system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: Previous research has managed to clearly define lean technical competencies. However, the behavioral competencies remain underestimated, and the roles of lean experts are not clearly stated: are they teachers, facilitators or technical experts? The present paper investigates lean behavioral competencies and their relationship to lean experts' roles. Design/methodology/approach: This article serves as an exploratory study built on interviews, observations and focus groups conducted during a three-year longitudinal study accompanied by a three-year follow-up. The case takes place in an international automotive company in partnership with Toyota in which lean adoption was part of a consistent strategy over a period of 20 years. Findings: The study clarifies lean behavioral competencies related to organizational efficiency (nominal management, improvement management and respect for people) and relational efficiency (problem resolution, competencies development and systemic interactions). The study helped create a typology of lean experts' roles related to the maturity level of the environment in which they intervened. Moreover, Lean experts' roles in congruence with the environment seem to positively influence the creation of emerging human relationships that are beneficial to process improvement and competencies development. Originality/value: This paper is the first to clarify behavioral competencies with respect to lean experts' roles and to study the temporality of the introduction of lean practices. The findings recommend that researchers better acknowledge the influence of lean behavioral competencies during lean adoption and their relationship to contextual factors and organizational performance. A practical methodology is proposed to measure the necessary behavioral adjustments of lean experts or employees. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Infection precautions (IP) facilitate standardized and safe patient care. Research has demonstrated several barriers to IP adherence among health care personnel (HCP) but potential exposure risk to SARS-CoV-2 and job role has not been considered. Researchers used self-reported baseline surveys with 191 HCPs at a university medical center to examine factors that may have affected IP adherence (eg, personal protective equipment [PPE] and hand hygiene errors) over the 2 weeks prior to the survey. Chi-square tests were used to determine if differences existed first, among job role and IP adherence, and second, the potential risk of exposure to SARS-CoV-2 and IP adherence. A binary logistic regression estimated if PPE nonadherence was associated with COVID-19 stress, job role, and potential exposure risk to SARS-CoV-2. PPE nonadherence varied by job role. Those in the Other group (ie, nonphysician/non-nursing HCP) reported significantly fewer errors (9.6%) compared to Physicians (26.5%) and Registered Nurses (33.3%). Hand/glove hygiene errors between COVID-19 patient rooms varied by job role. Respondents who had higher risks of exposure to SARS-CoV-2 were 5.74 times more likely to experience errors. The results provide implications for adopting systems-level approaches to support worker knowledge and engagement across job roles to improve IP adherence. • HCP self-reported and were observed to make PPE errors during the COVID-19 pandemic. • Less common HCP roles need training and education during a public health emergency. • The combination of repetitive job tasks and demands may contribute to PPE errors. • A systems-level approach to support HCP knowledge may improve adherence behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The United States Air Force Academy's mission is to "educate, train, and inspire men and women to become officers of character motivated to lead the U.S. Air Force and Space Force in service to our nation." Leaders of character are expected to (1) Live Honorably, (2) Lift Others, and (3) Elevate Performance through three critical steps of owning, engaging, and practicing their own development journey. The Cadet Summer Research Program (CSRP) is an institution-wide program that provides selected cadets the opportunity to function as independent adults while conducting research outside the classroom, in both military and civilian institutions. Cadets work on research projects in partnership with organizations across the country and are expected to produce results with real-world applications. Given the considerations explored above, we undertook a nascent exploration of the connection between management majors' CSRP journey and our deliberate approach in developing leaders of character. We strongly suggest that CSRP, as experienced by management majors, unfolds as a transformative experience that contributes to cadets owning the pursuit of their own identity, engaging in purposeful experiences, and practicing habits of thought and action. During this multifaceted process, cadets put into practice what it takes to live honorably, lift others, and elevate performance in socio-technical systems. In many ways, these systems replicate those they will serve as officers, better preparing them to lead in future conflicts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This dataset reports the responses to a survey designed for investigating the relationship that humans have with their smart devices. The dataset was collected between May and July 2020 and is a sample of over 500 respondents of various ethnicities and backgrounds. These data were used for modeling the ways that people relate to their devices using the notion of agency. However, the data can be used for complementing any study that intends to investigate a tool-mediated communication from the perspective of users, applying a variety of beliefs, attitudes, and expectations that users have in relation to their devices and themselves. This article presents the survey items as well as some preliminary data insights. The collected data were in English and the responses were anonymized to ensure GDPR compliance. The data were stored in a.csv file containing the respondents' answers to the questions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As the road to environmental and social sustainability is tied to large-scale systemic transitions, inevitably, sustainable innovation and entrepreneurship should be considered in their context. In this paper, we investigate how entrepreneurial opportunities develop in trajectories of sectoral transitions to sustainability. We adopt a social practice perspective and, based on insights from sectoral systems of innovation, socio-technical systems and activity theory, we develop an activity-based template/framework to represent sectors and their inherent dynamics in a structured and holistic way. The framework allows for the identification of entrepreneurial opportunities in the contradictions that emerge during transitions in the activities of sectors due to internally developed inconsistencies and/or external interventions. Hence, plausible narratives of the anticipated business futures can be constructed. It also surfaces the role of learning and knowledge creation, i.e., innovation, in resolving contradictions, thus creating value and stirring transitions in the direction of sustainability. The case study of the transition of the automobility sector to sustainability is used to test the framework proposed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Entrepreneurship is often understood as an individualistic endeavour. This article investigates how cultural communities shape entrepreneurial activity through the process of envisioning competing imagined futures. By deploying a microhistorical approach, it explores a public debate about the transition from sail to steam in a late nineteenth-century Danish maritime community. In the debate, local actors evaluated and negotiated future entrepreneurial actions as embedded in existing norms, interpretations of the past, and socio-technical systems rather than independent, non-conformist ventures. The article demonstrates the potential role of community when we attempt to understand better how entrepreneurs construct and dispute over imagined futures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The same individuals can express very different emotions in online social media with respect to face-to-face interactions, partially because of intrinsic limitations of the digital environments and partially because of their algorithmic design, which is optimized to maximize engagement. Such differences become even more pronounced for topics concerning socially sensitive and polarizing issues, such as massive pharmaceutical interventions. Here, we investigate how online emotional responses change during the large-scale COVID-19 vaccination campaign with respect to a baseline in which no specific contentious topic dominates. We show that the online discussions during the pandemic generate a vast spectrum of emotional response compared to the baseline, especially when we take into account the characteristics of the users and the type of information shared in the online platform. Furthermore, we analyze the role of the political orientation of shared news, whose circulation seems to be driven not only by their actual informational content but also by the social need to strengthen one's affiliation to, and positioning within, a specific online community by means of emotionally arousing posts. Our findings stress the importance of better understanding the emotional reactions to contentious topics at scale from digital signatures, while providing a more quantitative assessment of the ongoing online social dynamics to build a faithful picture of offline social implications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the complex and time-critical work practices within operational train traffic in Sweden by reporting on an incident causing an infrastructure breakdown and large traffic disruptions. Based on a workplace study approach, we report on how the control room workers – train traffic controllers and information officers – grasp, make sense of, and handle the consequences of the incident as it unfolds in real-time. We portray how the workers develop and acquire a sense of place in relation to the incident's severity which is essential for successfully handling the situation. By introducing the 'sense of place' concept originally derived from the field of natural resources to the domain of operational train traffic, we provide a deepened understanding of the challenges characterising remote control work from a safety-critical socio-technical systems perspective. Finally, reflections on the application of the 'sense of place' concept, safety aspects and directions for future research are provided. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the digital era, information consumption is predominantly channeled through online news media and disseminated on social media platforms. Understanding the complex dynamics of the news media environment and users' habits within the digital ecosystem is a challenging task that requires, at the same time, large databases and accurate methodological approaches. This study contributes to this expanding research landscape by employing network science methodologies and entropic measures to analyze the behavioral patterns of social media users sharing news pieces and dig into the diverse news consumption habits within different online social media user groups. Our analyses reveal that users are more inclined to share news classified as fake when they have previously posted conspiracy or junk science content and vice versa, creating a series of "misinformation hot streaks". To better understand these dynamics, we used three different measures of entropy to gain insights into the news media habits of each user, finding that the patterns of news consumption significantly differ among users when focusing on disinformation spreaders as opposed to accounts sharing reliable or low-risk content. Thanks to these entropic measures, we quantify the variety and the regularity of the news media diet, finding that those disseminating unreliable content exhibit a more varied and, at the same time, a more regular choice of web-domains. This quantitative insight into the nuances of news consumption behaviors exhibited by disinformation spreaders holds the potential to significantly inform the strategic formulation of more robust and adaptive social media moderation policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Command and control rooms are socio-technical systems that gather many devices and software of different types and aim at supporting groups of operators to manage missions and systems collaboratively. They include interactive systems, which particularly support operators in controlling the local or remote systems. These interactive systems are the very place where human–system integration can take place. It is thus important to design, develop, test, certify and deploy them very carefully. Moreover, designing these interactive systems requires addressing the needs of the group of users involved in common tasks for which communication, cooperation and production are mediated by computers. This paper proposes a model-based approach for the design and development of usable and reliable socio-technical interactive systems. This approach takes into account the sociotechnical aspects of the interactions between operators and systems in a command and control room. The paper presents the results of the application of the approach to the model-based development of collaborative applications for the management of collision risks between satellites and space objects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

According to historical statistical data, management and organizational factors (MOFs) contribute more to process accidents than technique factors. Under the umbrella of socio-tech system theory, human reliability analysis (HRA) has become a critical part of systemic probability risk analysis. In many HRA techniques, MOFs are among the performance shaping factors (PSFs). However, the interactions and causality of MOFs to human errors are still difficult to quantify and lack validation. To fill these gaps, a framework is proposed, considering data source selection, CBN construction algorithm comparison, and results validation. The case study employed the open access eMARS database as a data source. The optimized hybrid structure learning algorithm and Bayesian criteria parameter learning algorithm are employed to build a Causal Bayesian Network (CBN) of (MOFs) that lead to human error. The proposed kernel CBN is validated through prediction accuracy and sensitivity analysis. For theoretical contribution, the validated kernel BN could generally serve as the heart part of more specific CBNs as a basis for future works. For practical applications, an application shows the model's ability to quantify the contribution of MOFs to system reliability. The results show that human-machine interacting system reliability is most sensitive to organizational factors such as adequate training and procedures.

By enabling users to digitally monitor their health and behaviour, wearable technologies foster the perspective of the quantified self, a cultural phenomenon emphasising personal improvement through self-tracking. This vision, in turn, provides a basis for new forms of social engagement. In this netnographic study, we explore a brand community for users of the Fitbit wearable device. Our analysis reveals two structural dynamics – material agency and quantitative anchoring – which create a foundation for what we label 'accidental transhumanism', a transitional movement towards a transhumanist vision based on self-quantification, self-extension, and integration with technology. We further highlight the social engagement mechanisms, including motivating empowerment, friendly rivalry, and trusting engagement, that are built upon this foundation. Leveraging these findings, we theorise a novel model of the interaction of consumers and system artefacts in socio-technical assemblages. We refer to this novel phenomenon of brand community centred on self-quantification as quantified self-in-community, and consider both the beneficial and potentially deleterious impacts that it presents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]