Special Issue: Analysis and Design of Sociotechnical Systems

Modern engineered systems are increasingly connected with complex interactions among social and technical aspects, both during the design process and after fielding, for example, autonomous vehicles, smart cities, sharing economy platforms, and more broadly, emerging systems enabled by artificial intelligence (AI) and the internet of things, cross traditional cyber and physical, machine and human, boundaries with their performance largely determined by how they interact with society. While traditional engineering design has focused on designing an optimal technical artifact, there is an increasing recognition that social and organizational aspects of how designers collaborate and create, and how systems co-evolve with the human and built environments through use, are equally important drivers of value. Additionally, the rise of new sources of data and increased availability thereof create many opportunities to extend design research into the sociotechnical realm, for example, collecting and learning from new sources of data, understanding these complex new phenomena,...