IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - September 2017 - 73

I

n human society, individuals have long voluntarily organized themselves in groups,
which embody, provide and/or facilitate a
range of different social concepts, such as
governance, justice, or mutual aid. These
social groups vary in form, size, and permanence, but in different ways provide benefits
to their members. In turn, members of these groups
use their understanding and awareness of group expectations to help determine their own actions, to the
benefit of themselves, each other, and the health of
the group.
As a result of this observation, interest has grown
[13] recently in exploring how such social concepts can
be captured in both the design and operation of hybrid
systems that consist of both humans and machines.
For a system to do this, we argue that it requires 1)
social awareness, i.e., an ability to sense, perceive
and build models upon which to reason about
social concepts, and 2) social action, i.e., the
ability to act in accordance with this understanding, to intentionally bring about desirable social
states. Accordingly, this position paper discusses
the question of how to understand and formalize
the role of social concepts in self-organizing
socio-technical systems. When a system is both
socially aware and socially active, we coin the term
socially-sensitive system to describe it.
In elaborating upon the vision of socially-sensitive
systems, we draw on the key role of self-awareness for
adaptive behavior [25], [27], extending this concept
in order to emphasize the role therefore of socially
self-aware systems. Social awareness and social
action, we argue, furthers the adaptivity of both individuals and of collectives, through the gains of having multiple agents engaged in intentionally
coordinated efforts.
Further, we discuss how systems that are sensitive to social concepts might be realized through
engineered socio-technical entities (e.g., electronic institutions and online social networks).
We will therefore be required to design social
concepts into technical systems in a principled
way. Core to this is the engineering of systems
that explicitly contain social concepts, and an
awareness of them, at run time.
In order to make the consideration of social
awareness and social action more explicit in systems design, and to make progress towards a principled way of designing socially-sensitive systems, we
further propose a conceptual framework for their
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MTS.2017.2728727
Date of publication: 7 September 2017

SEPTEMBER 2017

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design (such a design activity will also be required to
be socially-sensitive), thereby advocating socially-sensitive systems design. The framework has three tenets:
social organization, social values, and social relations.
Social organization relates to issues of network structure and roles. Social values relate to states of the system that matter to individuals, and can, through social
mechanisms, come to matter to the group as a whole.
For social relations, we build on Sztompka's [37] sociological hierarchy, which differentiates a spectrum from
social behaviors through social actions, to social interactions and social relations.
However, in socio-technical systems, just as in human
society, there are issues that arise associated with free
riding, scale, and time. We argue that by appealing to
socially-sensitive systems design, we can support systems to be resilient to these issues, as they can be in
human societies, by engendering better social positioning: by moving beyond simply groups of interacting
agents, to societies of them.
Current social media systems, for instance, are
based on simplified, unidimensional models of social
relation and interaction, the consequent weaknesses
of which have been exposed during recent electoral
campaigns and the large amount of false information
published [15]. However, initial trust- and recommendation-based mechanisms have already been successfully deployed in various areas such as e-commerce
and agent-based systems, with the aim of mitigating
and containing potential misuse. Yet these systems
themselves are not free of issues [24], and even trust
systems have reached a level of complexity where
intermediation is necessary [28], [39].
Some of the new concepts discussed in socially-sensitive systems design will demonstrate how, by going
beyond the notion that collective behavior is only driven
by immediate (non-social) goals, mechanisms can be
created that lead to more enduring, value-driven collective behavior, while incorporating social mechanisms
that support human social values.
One of the key benefits of socially-sensitive systems design is therefore that it leads to systems that
intentionally engage in better positioning of themselves, through the increase of social potential. This
implies awareness and continuous redesign of the
social aspects of the system, in order to ensure resilience and generalization to future, unknown situations. This is a key idea in human societies, where
apparently wasteful activity in the short term leads to
societies being better positioned to deal with an
unforeseen event in the future.
At present, in many complex systems, especially
in systems of systems and networks, we are already
building in early forms of social processes without

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