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Socio-Digital Systems

Elegant technologies for complex lives

Socio-Digital Systems (SDS) aims to use an understanding of human values to help to change the technological landscape in the 21^st century. Beyond making us all more productive and efficient, we ask how we can build technology to help us be more expressive, creative, and reflective in our daily lives.

Our group considers a broad range of human values, aims to understand their complexity, and puts them front and centre in technology development. An important aspect of this endeavour is the construction of new technologies that, in turn, we ourselves can shape. In so doing, we may create new ways that help us to actively realise our aspirations and desires, to engage with or disconnect from the world around us, to remember our past or to forget it, to connect with others or disengage from them. Important here are technologies which ultimately make our lives richer, and which offer us choice and flexibility in the things that we do.

SDS does this through the bringing together of social science, design and computer science. We believe that by understanding human values, we open up a space of new technological possibilities that stretches the boundaries of current conceptions of human-computer interaction.

SDS Themes

This group develops its work through themes that represent interlocking sets of social and technical concerns. Currently, SDS is investigating the following.

	The Changing Form of Cultural Cargoes		Creativity in Daily Life
	The Future of Looking Back		Interacting without touching
	Machine encounters		Making Meaning in 21st Century Communication
	New ways of seeing		Rewriting Implicit Values: Moving from Fixed to Mobile