Socially Aware Systems Design: A Perspective Towards Technology-society Coupling

Abstract

Computing systems have a tremendous influence on how we understand the world. Due to its ubiquity and pervasiveness over the past decade, computing technology has created societal challenges (e.g., related to justice, sustainability, ethics, peace) that demand we reexamine how we design computer-based systems. Drawing on a
phenomenological understanding of the human-technology-society relation, this work contributes to the discussion on such challenges and to design practice with a framework we call socially aware design (SAwD). We developed this framework to bring awareness to the human-technology-society relation in the design process. In this paper, we present the framework’s main concepts, its underlying worldview, and its methodological base with reference to its origins. We illustrate the framework with design practices that we have experienced in designing systems in diverse situations. We also summarize key aspects of the proposed human-technology-society coupling relevant to the practice of technology design as a social phenomenon, which might open new agendas in the field.

Full text

AIS Transactions on Human-Computer Interaction AIS Transactions on Human-Computer Interaction
Volume 16 Issue 1 Article 4
3-31-2024
Socially Aware Systems Design: A Perspective Towards Socially Aware Systems Design: A Perspective Towards
Technology-society Coupling Technology-society Coupling
Maria Cecília Calani Baranauskas
University of Campinas
, mccb@unicamp.br
Roberto Pereira
Federal University of Paraná
, rpereira@inf.ufpr.br
Rodrigo Bonacin
Renato Archer Center of Technology
, rodrigo.bonacin@cti.gov.br
Follow this and additional works at: https://aisel.aisnet.org/thci
Recommended Citation Recommended Citation
Baranauskas, M., Pereira, R., & Bonacin, R. (2024). Socially Aware Systems Design: A Perspective Towards
Technology-society Coupling.
AIS Transactions on Human-Computer Interaction, 16
(1), 80-109.
https://doi.org/10.17705/1thci.00201
DOI: 10.17705/1thci.00201
This material is brought to you by the AIS Journals at AIS Electronic Library (AISeL). It has been accepted for
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Transactions on Human-Computer Interaction
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Volume 16
pp. 80 – 109
Issue 1
Transactions on Human-Computer Interaction
Volume 16
Issue 1
3-2024
Socially Aware Systems Design: A Perspective Towards
Technology-society Coupling
Maria Cecília Calani Baranauskas
Institute of Computing, University of Campinas, mccb@unicamp.br
Roberto Pereira
Department of Informatics, Federal University of Paraná, rpereira@inf.ufpr.br
Rodrigo Bonacin
Renato Archer Center of Technology, rodrigo.bonacin@cti.gov.br
Follow this and additional works at: http://aisel.aisnet.org/thci/
Recommended Citation
Baranauskas, M. C. C., Pereira, R., & Bonacin, R. (2024). Socially aware systems design: A perspective towards
technology-society coupling. AIS Transactions on Human-Computer Interaction, 16(1), 80-109.
DOI: 10.17705/1thci.00201
Available at http://aisel.aisnet.org/thci/vol16/iss1/4

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Paper 4
Transactions on Human-Computer Interaction
Research Paper DOI: 10.17705/1thci.00201 ISSN: 1944-3900
Socially Aware Systems Design: A Perspective towards
Technology-society Coupling
Maria Cecilia Calani Baranauskas
[Institute of Computing, University of Campinas
mccb@unicamp.br
Roberto Pereira
Department of Informatics, Federal University of Paraná
rpereira@inf.ufpr.br
Rodrigo Bonacin
Renato Archer Center of Technology
rodrigo.bonacin@cti.gov.br
Abstract:
Computing systems have a tremendous influence on how we understand the world. Due to its ubiquity and
pervasiveness over the past decade, computing technology has created societal challenges (e.g., related to justice,
sustainability, ethics, peace) that demand we reexamine how we design computer-based systems. Drawing on a
phenomenological understanding of the human-technology-society relation, this work contributes to the discussion on
such challenges and to design practice with a framework we call socially aware design (SAwD). We developed this
framework to bring awareness to the human-technology-society relation in the design process. In this paper, we present
the framework’s main concepts, its underlying worldview, and its methodological base with reference to its origins. We
illustrate the framework with design practices that we have experienced in designing systems in diverse situations. We
also summarize key aspects of the proposed human-technology-society coupling relevant to the practice of technology
design as a social phenomenon, which might open new agendas in the field.
Keywords: Social Phenomenon in Design, Information Systems, HCI, Co-design
Stefan Morana was the accepting senior editor for this paper.

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1 Introduction
Computing technology has infiltrated our lives and demanded that we understand it based on fundamental
social implications that emerge from its design. In the past decade, some initiatives in the human-computer
interaction (HCI) academic community have brought about discussion on topics such as design for the
developing world (HCI4D) (Dell & Kumar, 2016; Kumar et al., 2020), design for social justice (Fox et al.,
2016); design for social sustainability (Busse et al., 2012), HCI for peace (Hourcade et al., 2011),
postcolonial HCI (Irani et al., 2010), and others. These different approaches to social issues in design
become more complex when one considers how technology has evolved, especially with advances in
ubiquitous computing and artificial intelligence (AI). Recent discussions on human-centered AI (Xu, 2019;
Schmidt et al., 2021; Shneiderman, 2020; Kissinger et al., 2021) illustrate such complex technology-society
relations that remain unsolved or unestablished in design practice (Olsson & Väänänen, 2021). These
situations have raised questions on responsibility, accountability, and ethics and generated philosophical
debate about desirable technological futures (Frauenberger, 2019) and design practices.
Besides the discussion that the HCI community has engaged in regarding computing’s nature, the software
engineering field has also transformed its methods and practices and shown interest in issues that relate to
the human element in the software design process. Some authors have proposed combined process models
that integrate approaches, such as user-centered design and agile methods (Salah et al., 2015; Schön et
al., 2016; Losada, 2018), design thinking and agile software-development models (Dobrigkeit & De Paula,
2019; Hehn et al., 2019), and usability and interaction methods integrated with agile processes (Zapata,
2015; Lopes et al., 2017; Marques et al., 2018). While these approaches clearly show ways to bring people
to the software design stages to inform technical solutions, their focus on interaction with individual users
(people who can talk to the developers in agile processes) “does not address the need for broader socio-
technical awareness in systems engineering” (Baxter & Sommerville, 2011, p. 6).
While these different communities share some thoughts and principles regarding social concerns in
technology design, cross-conception efforts remain challenging and dependent on research from several
disciplines and perspectives. Underlying computer technology and its design processes rest implicit or
explicit assumptions regarding the nature of being in the world (ontology), shared values (axiology), the way
we relate to knowledge (epistemology), and methodologies and artifacts. The fundamental circularity, which
Winograd and Flores (1986, p. 4) have noted in observing “how a society engenders inventions whose
existence in turn alters that society”, draws on Heidegger’s (1996) view of meaning as a fundamentally
social phenomenon. In this phenomenological tradition, cognition is not an activity in some mental domain
(an in-the-head event) but a behavior pattern in a social background that includes concerns, beliefs, and
actions that pertain to the person-world relation. In this phenomenological background, a dynamic
relationship between the personal and the interpersonal domains constitutes social interaction as people
regulate their coupling with the environment by engaging with others’ activity (De Jaegher & Di Paolo, 2008;
Di Paolo & De Jaegher, 2017). The term participatory sensemaking refers to one’s ability to co-constitute
meaning in different contexts and understand the world through coordinated interaction with others (De
Jaegher & Di Paolo, 2007; Fuchs & De Jaegher, 2009; Gallagher, 2010).
In this paper, we argue that this fundamental circularity forms the basis for what we mean by social
understanding in design: understanding others and understanding the world through others in the design
process; thus, interactions among people in design situations for creating artifacts constitute the design
process. We understand “design” as the interaction between understanding and creating the world in which
people act and experience it (Winograd, 1996). Moreover, we acknowledge that technology design practices
should support interested parties in ongoing reflection about technology’s relationship to human life
(Sengers et al., 2005). Thus, in designing a system, designers should focus on responsibly involving
interested parties with the design situation (Baranauskas & Bonacin, 2008) with a view to achieve
participatory sensemaking.
Against this background, we develop a socially aware cross-discipline perspective on technology design’s
conceptual and practical aspects. Specifically, we address two research questions (RQ):
RQ1: On what grounds can one embed social understanding in technology-design processes?
RQ2: How can one treat social awareness operationally in the design process?
We argue that the dynamic human-technology-society coupling process involves intersubjective and socially
situated design aspects. Therefore, we present a framework for design, which we call socially aware design
(SAwD), that allows for the actors involved in the different design contexts to engage in participatory
sensemaking. We present three separate research projects to illustrate how one can draw on SAwD to

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design technology. The selected projects represent scenarios that involve: 1) IT design’s socio-cultural
implications in a digital divide context, 2) a formal organization’s involvement in the design process, and 3)
more-specific aspects of contemporary ubiquitous technology in social situations. Although we have offered
some specific contributions to academic literature regarding the approach over the years (e.g.,
Baranauskas, 2021, 2014; Baranauskas et al., 2013; Baranauskas & Bonacin, 2008), in this paper, we offer
a consolidative, analytical, and dynamical vision of the SAwD framework in different contexts over time and
its foundational basis for understanding technology design’s social nature. As such, we believe SAwD can
contribute with its practical relevance and experience to efforts to design technology-based systems, while
its conceptual formulation offers a way to understand system design as a social phenomenon.
This paper proceeds as follows: in Section 2, we discuss past approaches to bringing social considerations
into the field and discuss the context of design from some design-related fields. In Section 3, we delineate
the SAwD framework and briefly present its roots, components, and some artifacts. In Section 4, we
summarize three selected projects, illustrate concepts and practices with the framework in different
scenarios, and discuss the significant landmarks occurring throughout them from a macro perspective. In
Section 5, we discuss key concepts underlying how we understand the human-technology-society coupling
that emerges from SAwD and its practices. We also situate SAwD under some broad related approaches.
In Section 6, we synthesize aspects for further research in the field to better understand the social aspects
of technology design and conclude the paper.
2 Background: Social Concerns in Computing and Technology Design
In this section, we discuss the background for our work, highlight the ways in which computing’s human
element and social aspects emerged in fields related to information systems and computer technology
design. We do not exhaustively or comprehensively cover all contributors to the field but rather focus on
illustrating relevant ideas that have influenced it. Finally, we discuss some considerations from design-
related fields.
2.1 The Social Aspect of Computing in Early Work
Throughout computing’s early history, besides Naur’s book (1992) acknowledging computing as a human
activity (in addition to its hardware and software issues), Nygaard (1979, as cited in Sundblad, 2011) pointed
out its social and political aspects, which the concomitant participatory design (PD) movement brought
about. In essence, PD supports the processes in which users (originally workers) and researchers in
association develop long-term visions for technology, skills, and power and resource redistribution (Bødker
& Kyng, 2018). Based on phenomenology, Winograd and Flores (1986) had a profound influence on the
view that, by designing software, we design ways of being: people create tools that transform the world,
which, in turn, transforms them. Known for his pioneering work on interaction design, Winograd (1996) then
related computer technology to the human experience.
Adding to the narrative we want to build for designing today’s technology with social concerns, Stamper
(1973, 2000), known for his groundwork in organizational semiotics, introduced the information systems
concept as a “social science”. He created the semiotic framework (also called the semiotic ladder) to
consider information systems from six different levels (or ladder steps): the physical and empirical levels (to
consider the physical properties related to transmitting and storing signs); the syntactic, semantic, and
pragmatic levels (classics from semiotics); and the social level, a layer above pragmatics (to consider the
effect that systems have on society). Our perspective on the technology-society relation, which involves
both the technological and human systems in a complex web of semiotic relationships, owes much to
Stamper’s vision for information systems.
Another computing aspect relevant to contemporary ways in which humans and technology interact comes
from Weiser and Brown (1995) who inaugurated the term “ubiquitous computing”. Naming it as the third
wave in computing, Weiser proposed “calm technology” to describe “technology [that] recedes into the
background of our lives (p. 5) and, thus, emphasized technology’s social aspects. More specifically, in their
paper, they write:
Once we are located in a world, the door is opened to social interactions among shared things in
that world. As we learn to design calm technology, we will enrich not only our space of artifacts,
but also our opportunities for being with other people. Thus may design of calm technology come
to play a central role in a more humanly empowered twenty-first century. (Weiser & Brown, 1995,
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In reviewing these early works, we focus on reminding readers about some initial efforts on the human-
technology-society relation in computing. In addition to these efforts, the computing discipline more broadly
has changed its focus mainly due to technology’s transformation itself along with history. Initial questions
related to what human activities humanity could automate, from the first 30 years of computing, changed to
how humanity could extend human capacity with personal computers in the following 30 years. In the 21st
century, one cannot easily formulate questions as human-technology frontiers have become increasingly
blurred (Sellen et al., 2009). Indeed, technology continues to increasingly infiltrate our lives and cultures
and even people's bodies. From this technological evolution, challenges and complex issues arise from the
design perspective.
2.2 Some Design Perspectives, Efforts, and Challenges
The design concept has a presence in several academic fields related to information technology and
systems development, which includes information systems (Hevner et al., 2004; Hevner, 2007; Adam et al.,
2021), software engineering (Winograd, 1996), human-computer interaction (Löwgren & Stolterman, 2004;
Krippendorff, 2006), and each field understands design and design practice in its own way.
The IS field understands the word design as both a verb and noun: a process (set of activities) and a product
(artifact), while IS researchers have acknowledged design science as a primary paradigm that characterizes
much research in the field. With its roots in engineering and in Simon’s (1996) work, the design science
paradigm fundamentally focuses on solving problems and “extend[ing] the boundaries of human and
organizational capabilities by creating new and innovative artifacts” (Hevner et al., 2004, p. 75). Broadly
speaking, artifacts refer to prescriptions that enable researchers and practitioners to understand a problem
and implement solutions (information systems) in an organization (Hevner et al., 2004). Researchers
organize design artifacts into four types: constructs (vocabulary and symbols), models (abstractions and
representations), methods (algorithms and practices), and instantiations (implementations and prototype
systems). Simon’s (1996) “problem space”, which comprises people, business organizations, and their
existing or planned technologies, comprises the environment for doing design. While proposing to combine
the design science research (DSR) with behavioral and organizational theories, Hevner et al. (2004)
summarized several challenges facing the community. More recently, Morana et al. (2018) discussed the
need for tool support in DSR and identified categories of tools’ requirements raised from the research
community for supporting work in the field, while Adam et al. (2021) summarized three different modes of
DSR methods for supporting HCI projects: an “interior mode” focused on improving system interfaces to
support effective human use, an “exterior mode” focused on interactions that increase human capabilities,
and a “gestalt mode” focused on integrating the interior and exterior modes.
Understanding design as problem solving may work in situations with clearly defined problems, with a finite
space for solutions, and with actors who approach technical problems rationally (Krippendorff, 2006;
Löwgren & Stolterman, 2004). Nevertheless, in the social domain, problems involve different
understandings for design situations due to people’s different worldviews and experiences. Named by Rittel
and Webber (1984) as “wicked” problems, these problems invite a conception of design that accommodates
the participation of stakeholders in such a way that “defining a problem is part of its solution” (Krippendorff,
2006, p. 213). While researchers recognize stakeholders’ involvement in the design process as highly
desirable, how to best do so remains an open question.
Drawing on Schön (1983, 1987) and other design thinkers (Rittel & Weber, 1984; Krippendorf, 2006;
Löwgren & Stolterman, 2004) who consider defining a problem as part of its solution, we subscribe to the
idea that problems and their solutions should evolve in parallel. Thus, design begins when people start
exploring what they can do. In this work, we use the term “interested parties” to refer to people who
participate in a design process and, thus, who both affect and are affected by prospective technology. We
focus on weakening the distinction between designers, developers, consultants, domain experts, other
existing “stakeholders”, and ordinary people in a socially situated context. These individuals make design
decisions jointly in a co-design process, which involves proposing and using artifacts to meet specific aims
in a design situation. We refer to their actions in design workshops as semioparticipatory. Thus, people
interact with others in design environments not as informants in the design process but as co-designers.
Thus, artifacts and practices that allow intersubjective relations along and through the co-design process
constitute the design process.
Considering the increasingly complex human-technology-society scenario, we should dare to ask how to
design computing systems for a better future as human beings. In this paper, we provide a conceptual
framework for a socially aware design approach characterized by the relation of people with artifacts and
design environment, which people experience as a participatory sensemaking process.

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The socially aware design framework stands as an invitation to a design vision in which one seeks to share
social responsibilities in creating technology and a desirable future. We acknowledge technology design as
a social activity that involves designers as interested parties with other people with whom they bring forth
new artifacts: the participants in the design process affect and are affected by the design environment and
engage in participatory sensemaking (i.e., people in the design environment understand the surrounding
world through others via coordinated interaction).
3 The Socially Aware Design Synthesized as a Framework
SAwD supports a systemic vision for designing technological artifacts, one that seeks to set conditions for
interested parties’ participatory sensemaking in the codesign process. In this section, we delineate SAwD
as a framework for designing systems and briefly present its roots, components, and some artifacts that can
mediate its practices.
3.1 Theoretical Roots and Rationale for SAwD
Since computing systems mediate our experience in the world, we understand information systems through
a semiotic perspective. Based on how Peirce (1932) defines sign, or representamen, as “something which
stands to somebody for something in some respect or capacity” (p. 228), one can infer that meaning or
sense exists in the context of the subjective experience of people interpreting underlying information (Fuchs,
2018). Thus, one can see information systems as social constructions grounded in the actions that people
who take part in them perform (Stamper, 1973; Liu, 2000; Liu & Li, 2014). Because people continually
interact with each other and with artifacts, the world and people constantly change.
In the frame of organizational semiotics
1
, Stamper (1993) characterized an organization as a nested
arrangement of informal, formal, and technical information systems. He called this structure an
“organizational onion” (p. 14). In an organization, social norms enable people to act together in a coordinated
way for specific purposes. Stamper defined social norms not as documents (or written explicit statements)
but as socially constructed patterns (e.g., a “field of force”) related to how people think and act in society. In
an informal information system, people bring an organization’s culture, tradition, and values to a situation,
and participants assume and change commitments and responsibilities based on negotiation, discussion,
and physical actions. Alongside an informal information system exists a formal information system with
protocols and policies that expound meanings and purposes. A technical information system (most often
computational systems) can handle the formal information system due to its nature.
Stamper’s (1993) organizational onion represents a good metaphor for how we view technology design as
situated in its informal, formal, and technical aspects. As signs exist only for those who can establish their
meaning, in the SAwD, by “organization”, we mean any organized social group in a shared context. SAwD
has three basic assumptions: 1) “Interested parties” represent real, embodied people (or social groups) who
participate in design rather than abstractions in a designer’s mind; 2) people have different skills,
worldviews, and history, which SAwD recognizes as a creative potential for responsible involvement in the
process; and 3) different people who can bring forth their experience, worldview, and cultural values
participate in the interaction process, which allows for different parties to learn from each other. Artifacts,
systems, and practices enable participatory sensemaking in the technology codesign process and a
(phenomenological) relation of circularity between people and the design environment.
3.2 The Co-design Process in SAwD
We understand that designing demands that people directly engage with others and with artifacts in specific
design circumstances. The design process itself resides in the coexisting informal, formal, and technical
information that a social group shares. The “semiotic onion” metaphorically represents Stamper’s (1993)
informal, formal, and technical information systems (in the nucleus in Figure 1), which we use to mean that
the design situation exists in the context of a social group with its beliefs, values, commitments, daily life,
and artifacts. The latter refers to signs of the informal layer. It also coexists with a social group’s organized
or formal level and is subject to, for example, social norms and legislation. Any technical system must then
emerge in the informal and formal information systems, carry their influence, and influence them back.
1
The endeavor of an interdisciplinary community of researchers coming from different backgrounds and working together to develop
theoretical and practical issues related to a science of information systems (Stamper, 2002).

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The actors who participate in the design process, named interested parties, can construct meaning together
in a shared manner through the co-design process (see Figure 1). By co-design, we mean a participatory
sensemaking process that involves a diverse group of people (e.g., experts, designers, prospective users,
developers, researchers, and other stakeholders) who come from different contexts with various conditions
and mindsets and who experience a design situation through coordinated action with others and with
artifacts in the design environment. Society constitutes the wider environment in which people’s perceptions,
actions, and artifacts exist and where people feel co-design’s effects. The challenges we deal with in this
approach involve how to enable the interested parties to participate effectively with their joint attention, joint
and coordinated actions, and sensemaking in the co-design process.
Figure 1. The Circularity of the Co-design Process in the Semiotic Onion
We propose design practices, crossing the three layers of the semiotic onion, as methodological instruments
for the participants to raise different concerns and express the knowledge they bring to the situation.
Depending on the situated context, these practices happen in co-located meetings (named
semioparticipatory workshops (SpW)) or remotely through an online platform where community
representatives, researchers, and other interested parties come together to share experiences and ideate
the prospective system in a co-design process.
3.3 SAwD Design Environment
From a practical point of view, SAwD comprises three fundamental elements (see Figure 2): 1) the
interested parties or coauthors (the people involved), 2) artifacts and systems to mediate the coauthors’
(inter)action in the co-design process (the instruments involved), 3) semioparticipatory workshops and
methods to allow coauthors to engage in participatory sensemaking and co-construct the design outcome
through their interaction with artifacts and each other (the interaction involved). Together, these three
elements constitute the “environment” (with and) in which people (inter)act during the design situation. In
the following section, we synthesize the framework’s fundamental elements.
3.3.1 Interested Parties (Coauthors)
Building artifacts does not belong exclusively to professional designers. This reframing of roles recognizes
ordinary people’s aptitude to engage creatively and responsibly in the co-design process. Thus, interested
parties perceive and act, as individuals or as social groups, in conceiving a product and its consequences.
They bring forth their social, economic, political, and so on world to the design situation. Moreover, they
commit to and mobilize resources (information, connections with other people, time, position in the
community, etc.) in the design process.

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Designers also represent interested parties responsible for orchestrating the involvement of all participants
together in the process. The parties differ in their capabilities, resources, intentions, and interests in the
design product and in their roles in the design process. Designers need to understand the interdependencies
between the interested parties’ interests and objectives regarding the product being created. Parties build
design solutions for their (inter)action, and the artifacts create essential possibilities for everyone's
participation and co-authorship in the design process.
Figure 2. Fundamental Elements of the SAwD Framework
3.3.2 Some Artifacts for Socially Situated Practices
Several artifacts support the SAwD design process. Some artifacts have a general purpose, while others
serve a purpose in specific design situations, such as designing for an interactive digital TV (Buchdid et al.,
2019), considering human values in interactive systems (Pereira & Baranauskas, 2015), or supporting
different needs of participants due to digital illiteracy (Neris et al., 2012, 2021). In what follows, as an
illustration rather than prescription, we briefly present three general-purpose artifacts that mediate key
actions in our framework (see Figure 3): the 1) diagram of interested parties (DIP) from Stamper and
Kolkman (1991), the 2) evaluation frame (EF) from Baranauskas (2014), and the 3) semiotic ladder (SL)
that we adapted from Stamper (1993).
Using the artifacts involves an intrinsic dynamic aspect that moves participants back and forth in each
artifact and from one artifact to the others; in this way, participants revisit information raised previously in
the process. The co-design process enables the feeding of information back and forth among artifacts (e.g.,
the evaluation frame content is associated with the interested parties raised in the diagram, and the semiotic
ladder is associated with content in the evaluation frame). Thus, one can trace a rationale for proposed
solutions back from the artifacts. We describe each artifact briefly next.

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Figure 3. Diagram of Interested Parties (top left), Evaluation Frame (Top Right), Stamper’s Semiotic Ladder
(Bottom)
Diagram of interested parties: this artifact helps codesigners explore a project’s technical and social scope
as comprehensively as possible (or problem situation) by bringing up parties directly or indirectly impacted
by the prospective design solution. It includes the role that people in the initial participant group (primary
interested parties) and new ones (who might join the group) play in exploring the design situation.
The analysis of interested parties, which takes place during the discussion that this artifact mediates, helps
codesigners situate themselves in the frame and understand the design situation’s scope in a shared
manner. Figure 3 (top left) illustrates a diagram of interested parties (Stamper & Kolkman, 1991) that SAwD
presents as a template for participants to fill using stickers. The operation in the diagram’s nucleus
represents the prospective system (or project) under consideration. From the center to the periphery,
participants use the layers as reminders for categories of people or organizations that potentially impact or
suffer the impact of a prospective design solution. In SAwD, participants raise, discuss, and annotate these
people and organizations on sticky notes and place them onto holding posters during a semioparticipatory
workshop. Identifying interested parties does not follow a specific order; instead, co-designers identify
interested parties according to their discussion and its rhythm. The contribution layer reminds codesigners
to consider actors who would contribute directly to the design situation (e.g., end users, developers). The
source layer reminds codesigners to consider actors who bring data or information to the design situation
(e.g., clients, suppliers). The market layer reminds codesigners to consider actors who collaborate or
compete to create the design solution in the market (which can be figurative) and relate to the design
situation (e.g., partners and competitors). The community layer reminders codesigners to consider actors
who influence the design or product situation (even if they never end up using it) in the societal context (e.g.,
bystanders and legislators).
These different categories do not represent rigid, prescriptive categories that codesigners should follow. For
example, some interested parties may reside between different layers or belong to more than one layer.
Instead, as reminders, the diagram serves to raise participants' awareness of different people who
potentially affect or are affected by the prospective design solution in a societal context.
Evaluation frame: this artifact amplifies the diagram of interested parties’ scope by helping codesigners to
anticipate potential problems with an envisaged design solution that might affect interested parties. The
evaluation frame helps to raise both issues interested parties face in the current situation or could potentially
face with a prospective design solution (e.g., a computing system). Besides raising and anticipating

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problems, participants can imagine and propose ideas and solutions to the identified issues. Figure 3 (top
right) illustrates the evaluation frame template that participants can fill in with stickers in a SAwD workshop.
The evaluation frame enables participants to project (by imagining) a situation in which the prospective
design object already exists in a societal context. This exercise results in elements (expressed in sticky
notes) that identify specific interested parties’ main issues and possible ideas that could lead to
requirements for a prospective system’s technical solutions. Moreover, it allows a dynamic movement up,
down, and between layers and back and forth between the artifacts.
Thus, the evaluation frame creates an opportunity to envisage a situation with a prospective system and
avoid anticipated issues. While this imagined situation does not prevent all problems that arise with design
solutions in the real world where one encounters many different interests, the artifact potentially raises
participants' awareness about what implications a prospective solution could have by helping them to
consider the different roles people have in different societal contexts.
Semiotic ladder: Stamper (1993) proposed the original semiotic ladder to think about an information
system’s semiotic aspects. He extended the syntactics, semantics, and pragmatics layers of classical
semiotics to include elements from technological infrastructure (physical world, empirics) and the social
consequences of using signs (social world). In our framework, we adapted the semiotic ladder to organize
a prospective solution’s requirement. We also use the Semiotic ladder for evaluation purposes once
participants concretize a solution in a computational system, as it covers aspects from technological
infrastructure to human-related ones.
Results from the evaluation frame feed the semiotic ladder organizing requirements in the ladders’ steps.
Figure 3 (bottom) illustrates the artifact in SAwD. The top three steps relate to how interested parties use
signs, their roles in sensemaking (semantics step), purpose (pragmatics step), and social effects (social
world step). The bottom three steps refer to how signs are structured (syntactic step), how they are conveyed
(empirics step), and what physical properties they possess (physical world step).
In SAwD, participants also use the semiotic ladder for inspection or evaluation purposes (e.g., to associate
technological infrastructure issues or concerns (the three bottom steps) with aspects of the human
information system (the three upper steps)). As with the previous artifacts, there is no predefined order for
using the Semiotic Ladder. Although the ladder offers the metaphor that is based on one step built on top
of the other, participants can go up or down the steps, as necessary.
The work on the semiotic ladder potentially enables participants to raise awareness for the semiotic nature
of the technology and the design process.
3.3.3 Semioparticipatory Workshops (SpW)
Semioparticipatory workshops constitute the framework’s dynamic engine. They enable participants'
intersubjective interactions and make the design process viable through informal, formal, and technical
layers along the design lifecycle. SAwD’s participants in the designer role create or adapt various artifacts
to allow all participants at each workshop to engage in specific practices. The workshops articulate the
design situation’s informal, formal, and technical aspects (see Figures 1 and 2) by alternating between each
meaning layer as participants co-construct the design object. We use the term “semioparticipatory”
2
to mark
our focus on aspects of people’s intersubjective interaction (joint attention, coordination, joint action) during
their exchanges with the design environment, which artifacts co-design practices make effective. Given that
different interested parties participate in the interaction and what they bring forth in cultural, economic, and
political terms, understanding the design situation (and its issues) occurs early in the process, which
improves over time.
Participants prototype and discuss ideas for representing a design product’s visual, aesthetic, and
interaction elements that result from SpWs at different moments. From initial prototyping to constructing the
design solution (e.g., a technical computing system), participants’ efforts occur at the three knowledge levels
(informal, formal, and technical). SpWs also play a crucial role in the incremental development cycle where
the parties explore the solution’s current version and evaluate the project's status. Design and development
activities require evaluation actions, which have a symbiotic relationship with design actions in the design
and development lifecycle and also happen in SpWs planned for this purpose.
2
We define this term in analogy to concepts such as semio-chemistry (processes in which chemicals carry messages by establishing
communication between organisms)

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A key characteristic of SAwD is SpWs’ dynamic and situated nature since they serve as the basis for the
“environment” proposed for interaction in the co-design process. An SpW comprises the artifacts chosen to
mediate actions among interested parties and practices conducted with them towards ideating a solution
and concretizing the co-design outcome. Thus, people, artifacts, and interaction processes constitute
participatory sensemaking for the emerging technological product.
4 The Socially Aware Design Illustrated
SAwD has matured from several research projects and academic works. We and other collaborators have
put it into practice in different social contexts (e.g., academic, industrial, and societal contexts) and we have
discovered specific design challenges (Baranauskas, 2014, 2021). In this section, we revisit three different
design projects that different researchers have conducted under the framework and analyze their
approaches, experiences, and results as SAwD evolved over time. We illustrate the framework’s key
concepts and practices in diverse scenarios and describe the major landmarks that have occurred
throughout them from a macro perspective. Table 1 summarizes the three selected projects regarding key
issues, their design context, people involved, design environment (SAwD practices and artifacts), and
outcome (design products).
Table 1. A Brief Characterization of the Three Selected Projects3
Project
E-citizenship
Pro-IDTV
Socioenactive Systems
Key issues
Illiteracy, inclusion,
accessibility, design rationale,
digital culture, co-design
Organizational culture, economic
viability, shared understanding,
situated practices, production
chain
Pervasive and ubiquitous
computing, physical-digital-social
coupling, socioenactive systems
design
Context
Community: situated within a
low-income community, at Vila
União, in the city of Campinas
Industry: situated at EPTV, a
television broadcast company
that serves 10 million people
Ubiquity: situated in 3 different
scenarios: 1. An exploratory
museum, 2. A hospital, and 3. A
school
People
Residents, local workers,
community representatives,
researchers from different
fields (computer science,
education, anthropology, arts,
public administrators)
Technical staff, TV content
editors, operational engineers,
web designers, interns, computer
science researchers
Children, families, medical staff,
school staff, museum staff,
researchers from different fields
(computer science, anthropology,
arts, education, psychology)
Environment
Semioparticipatory workshops
conducted with participants in
their community through
different artifacts, from the
classical ones (diagram of
interested parties, the
evaluation frame and the
semiotic ladder) to artifacts
designed for specific aims
(e.g., to raise vocabulary for
visual representations)
Semioparticipatory workshops
conducted at the EPTV
organization with participants in
the TV site through different
artifacts, from the classical ones
(diagram of interested parties, the
evaluation frame, and the
Semiotic Ladder) to artifacts
designed for specific aims (e.g.,
to work out iDTV application
patterns)
Semioparticipatory workshops
conducted at the partners' places
(an exploratory museum, a hospital
and an educational space)4,
through different artifacts designed
for specific aims (e.g., to work out
different configurations of social-
physical-digital coupling) in each
context
Outcome
Participants digital inclusion by
co-designing an inclusive
online social network system
Co-designing an interactive digital
TV application and its product
development process
Co-designing (and evaluating)
socioenactive systems
4.1 E-Citizenship: SAwD in a Community Context
The research project “E-Citizenship: Systems and Methods in the Constitution of a Culture Mediated by
Information and Communication Technology” (2007-2010), which received support from the FAPESP-
Microsoft Research Virtual Institute, focused on expanding computing technology’s capabilities to address
the social and economic challenges that disadvantaged communities face. Researchers conducted the
project also to address one of the five grand computing challenges in Brazil that the Brazilian Computer
3
University of Campinas’ Research Ethics Committee approved the research projects that we report in this work under numbers
CAAE: 72413817.3.0000.5404, 039.0.146.000-08, 37341414.4.0000.5404
4
Including some research workshops remotely during the COVID-19 pandemic.

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Society launched for 2006-2016 (Medeiros, 2008): the “participative and universal access of the Brazilian
citizen to knowledge”. In e-citizenship, we faced this challenge by investigating the relationships that people
established in their informal communities, organized around some particular interest, using societal artifacts,
which included computer technology (Baranauskas, 2014; Baranauskas et al., 2013; Neris et al., 2021).
This research effort indirectly addressed and informed efforts to design e-government systems and public
policies, especially in disadvantaged communities where literal and digital literacy often poses an issue.
4.1.1 Context and Outcome
The project, which the Secretary of Citizenship of the Municipality of Campinas endorsed, allowed citizens
(which residents from the Vila União neighborhood represented) to participate. By that time, this
neighborhood had a significantly vulnerable population and faced significant social risks. The
neighborhood’s community center, supported by national and local government programs for digital
inclusion, hosted the project's activities.
We understand that e-citizenship presupposes an emancipatory process in which technology design should
promote people's learning and potentially help to improve their condition overall to access knowledge
relevant to their lives through technology without discrimination. Designing perceptible, operable, intelligible
computer systems that make sense to people would not be such a complex problem if we did not work in a
real scenario with functional illiteracy.
The co-creation and reflective thought resulted in a product called the Village on Net (translated from the
original Vila na Rede): an inclusive social network system co-designed throughout the project with the
participants. This system was inspired by previous practices of that group for exchanging goods, in which
they used a space on the wall of the Community Center, reserved to share notes on the products people
offered or sought.
4.1.2 People
During the project, several associations and cooperatives operated actively in the neighborhood. The
relationships established in these associations reflected a cultural and political context. They served as a
channel for circulating information, knowledge, and symbolic values that characterized that community.
Some residents, workers, and community representatives joined the e-citizenship project. This group
participated actively in the project’s development and contributed their experiences and worldviews.
In addition to the community members, researchers, developers, and other invited partners participated in
the workshops (each workshop had 25 to 30 participants on average). These groups showed diversity in
age, education, professional training, interests, access to digital technology, and knowledge. Accordingly,
these multi-voiced groups created the design process and product for the project through participatory
sensemaking, which they enabled via interacting with each other and the artifacts in SpW.
4.1.3 Environment (SAwD Practices and Artifacts)
Across 11 SpWs, participants explored informal, formal, and technical issues underlying the project context
through the SAwD’s artifacts. These issues included digital (and functional) illiteracy, a sense of autonomy,
and social inclusion. As participants co-designed the inclusive social network, each workshop’s outcomes
and artifacts fed the next ones and enabled participants to share their daily life values and how they
perceived the activities and technology. We created specific card techniques to help the participants tell and
represent different narratives regarding their daily practices with the system they were co-designing. For
example, the informal way the community offered products to others was through meaningful narratives.
These activities also revealed norms (extracted from narratives) that shed light on procedures, behavior
patterns, and ways of interacting with people in their contexts of action (e.g., their relationship with “informal”
work). Mutual learning evolved along with the workshops and revealed how the group gradually made sense
of their co-designed system’s features and aesthetical elements. Among the results from the workshops, a
participant (an artisan embroiderer) proposed a circular menu for the system's features and said that she
got inspiration from a “chart of colorful sewing thread” she used in her work. The diagram of interested
parties and the evaluation frame (see Figure 4 on the top right on the wall) mediated the discussion and
helped participants generate the first ideas for the prospective system.
A book in Portuguese details the primary outcomes of the e-Citizenship project (Baranauskas et al., 2013).
Other specific research results published in journals, conferences, and doctoral and master’s theses explore
and discuss specific activities in these workshops throughout the project, such as Almeida et al. (2009),
Miranda et al. (2010), Neris et al. (2012), and Hayashi and Baranauskas (2013).

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Figure 4. Examples of Artifacts and Practices of the E-citizenship Project
4.1.4 Lessons Learned and Contributions of (and to) SAwD
This project illustrates the SAwD approach to ICT4D as “a path we construct as we walk” (i.e., the
prospective system being designed and the participants’ abilities regarding technology co-evolve due to the
people-design environment`s relation of circularity). It reveals that the design situation’s intersubjective
aspects (joint attention, cooperation, coordinated action) unfold along with SAwD practices: each action
creates possibilities for more actions and understanding among the participants. Inclusion happens “during
the walk”: as the design progresses, people develop skills for using other systems and technologies that do
not depend on that particular one. Currently, participants use different social networks and digital tools.
Initially, participants' daily lives and sense of belonging to their community strongly influenced the system's
co-design. This influence appears in the system’s name itself (Village on the Net) and its general structure
and content (which the participants organized according to ideas, events, and products). This structure and
content resulted from a walk that expresses participants' actions in their daily lives in the community. For
example, the desire to see their ideas and products exposed to the community drove them to design ideas
and product spaces in the system. During the walk, interaction among the participants through artifacts and
the technology they were designing made them aware that their ideas and products were being exposed to
the world, which awakened the community members to their skills to use other digital technology daily.
This project illustrates the technology-society coupling as it addressed the concept of “inclusion” as a
societal phenomenon. This phenomenon drew on the autonomy of the involved people to joint action along
SAwD. Thus, while the project represents an instantiation of SAwD, it mainly represents a way of addressing
social awareness in design, especially in the context of under-resourced communities.

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4.2 Pro-IDTV: SAwD in an Industrial Context
This project, in an organizational culture, involved designing interactive digital television (iDTV) systems as
a new product for a broadcasting TV company while drawing on SAwD.
4.2.1 Context and Outcomes
The work took place inside EPTV
5
, an affiliate of the largest Brazilian TV broadcasting company that reaches
around 300 cities and 10 million citizens. To attract more viewers to the channel, EPTV selected a TV show
to add an interactive application. The selected TV show explored ecology, local music and food, and outdoor
activities such as catching fish as a sport. EPTV stipulated that the interactive application for the TV show
should be an iDTV application to complement its televised content.
Three researchers conducted the work with a team of professionals in the organization over seven months.
The process resulted in an interactive system for the selected TV show and a situated design process,
informed by SAwD, named Pro-IDTV (Buchdid et al., 2014, 2019).
4.2.2 People
Ten people from the TV show production staff took part in the workshops and co-design activities. Among
them were editors (including the chief editor), a content producer, a journalist, and a designer, a person in
charge of new technologies (operational and technological development manager), people responsible for
deploying new technologies (supervisor of development and projects, and technological and operational
development engineer), a person responsible for implementing and supporting the new technology
(technological and operational development technician), and a student intern. Three researchers with
background in computer science and HCI mediated the practices, selected artifacts, and orchestrated their
use.
4.2.3 Environment (SAwD Practices and Artifacts)
The researchers held four Semioparticipatory Workshops at EPTV offices with all the participants (see
Figure 5). Further software-development activities and meetings with part of the organization’s team
occurred throughout the process at the station. Prototype evaluations occurred outside EPTV with the
prospective target audience. Figure 5 shows the development process, which we define as movements that
emphasize the informal, formal, and technical aspects of the design and engineering of the system
prototype. The different movements involve from problem understanding to the system's deployment; as the
waves move to the right in each movement, the solution is closer to the technical system.
Figure 5. SAwD in Pro-iDTV Design and Development Processes: The Four “Movements” of the Process
(Left) and Snapshots of Movements’ Practices (Right)
5
EPTV: a Portuguese acronym for “Pioneer Broadcasting Television Stations”

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Each workshop used different artifacts to mediate activities, which, in turn, informed the movements of the
process. Figure 5 (right) presents pictures of some interested parties that participated in discussions that
the main artifacts in the first and second movements mediated, and prototype building and evaluation
activities in the third and fourth movements. During the process, participants created and used other specific
artifacts (e.g., participatory pattern cards, TV design patterns). Buchdid et al. (2019) detailed the 20 different
activities and artifacts that participants used in this project within different design stages.
4.2.4 Lessons Learned and Contributions of (and to) SAwD
Bringing social awareness to a formal TV organization’s design environment characterized the technology-
society coupling in this project. The coupling of technology-society in this project is characterized by bringing
social awareness to the design environment of a formal TV organization. The audience of iDTV applications
involved a large and diverse group of people including those with low digital literacy. With SAwD, the
participants could experience awareness of “the other” in the process of participatory sensemaking. The
other in this project referred to not only end users in the audience but also the people involved in the design
situation (with their different worldviews, responsibilities, and roles they played in the organization). The
different interested parties worked together with support from artifacts that mediated their actions and
favored their participatory sensemaking.
This project illustrates the feasibility of using SAwD to constitute a design environment in which formal
organizations can bring their organizational culture, conflicting interests, practical business concerns, and
so on to the design situation. The process involves an exchange (a circular relation) with the environment
whereby people influence and are influenced by their social awareness (e.g., regarding the different levels
of literacy of the TV audience, the relations of power inside the organization, etc.).
4.3 Socioenactive Systems: SAwD in Ubiquitous Context
“Socioenactive Systems” (2017-2023) refers to systems that strongly coupled physical, digital, and social
(embodied) elements a ubiquitous and pervasive computing context. The name also references Varela et
al.’s (1991, 2016) enactivist approach to cognition and human experience, which argues that cognition does
not exclusively result from neuronal processes in a person's head but happens in a dynamic set of
interactions between brain, body, and environment. In this project, participants systematically understood
socioenactive systems’ interactive design via creating and experimenting with such systems in three
different scenarios: a learning environment, an exploratory museum, and a hospital setting. The “socio” in
socioenactive systems emphasizes the intersubjective aspects in the tripartite relation between the social,
the physical, and the digital elements that constitute the experience.
4.3.1 Context and Outcomes
This project involved three settings: an exploratory science museum, a hospital to treat facial deformities,
and an educational space. In all three, we designed and built installations and investigated the socioenactive
experience with SAwD. Figure 6 illustrates the artifacts and workshops in these three scenarios.
From a research perspective, this project’s most important contributions include the socioenactive concept
and its methodological and technical characterization. From a practical standpoint, participants co-designed
and experienced different design products in situated contexts. Some examples include design products,
such as an interactive art installation (Duarte et al., 2018), huggable plush animals and displays (Silva et
al., 2022), a tangible tabletop (Mendoza & Baranauskas, 2019; Baranauskas et al., 2021), and smart
interactive robots (Caceffo et al., 2022; Valente et al., 2021).
4.3.2 People
The three scenarios had children as key interested parties and involved different adult parties. For the
museum scenario, children accompanied by their parents constituted the central interested parties as they
visited the place to explore and interact with various objects and exhibitions. Researchers, graduate
students, elementary school teachers, parents, friends, and the museum staff also constituted other
interested parties in this scenario. Children who had facial treatments, their mothers, and hospital staff
constituted the main interested parties in the hospital scenario. The treatments usually took several years,
and the hospital staff (doctors, nurses, receptionists, speech therapists, psychologists, and psych
pedagogues), children’s families, the ethics committee, and hospital donors constituted the other interested
parties who directly or indirectly participated in the scenario. Finally, in the educational space scenario,
children in elementary school, teachers, other school staff, and families also constituted interested parties.

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These interested parties participated in the project's early stages when we studied and created the
scenarios.
Figure 6. A) Educational Space and Children Driving a Robot with their Boots, B) Hospital and Children
Holding Plush Monkeys and Bears that Performed Different Actions when Hugged, and C) Art Installation
that “Dialogues” with People’s Movements
4.3.3 Environment (SAwD Practices and Artifacts)
Researchers conducted several workshops during the last four years in the three scenarios. The workshops
occurred in situated contexts that involved representatives from the interested parties. Workshops represent
SAwD's iterative and constructive approach to designing technical systems through sensemaking and the
interaction between different social groups as part of the social-physical-digital tripartite relation.
Consider, for example, the educational scenario. Figure 6 (left) illustrates an activity that researchers and
teachers conducted with children: via their coordinated action using their boots, they took a robot dressed
as a wolf with embedded technology (sensors and actuators) to a point on a platform they called grandma’s
laboratory. This narrative from the children themselves recreated the Little Red Riding Hood tale. In their
version, the robot wolf and forest rangers (children with boots) must lead the wolf to grandma’s laboratory
(i.e., a black spot on the yellow carpet). The robot wolf moved forward, and when it encountered an obstacle
(e.g., children’s boots), it backed off and randomly changed direction before proceeding. Children did not
follow a planned or a priori-defined script to perform their actions. Instead, the way in which they perceived
their own movement, the robot’s movement, and their fellows’ movements guided their actions. In the task,
they needed to coordinate together (i.e., make sure the robot reached the lab) (see Caceffo et al., 2022;
Valente et al., 2021).
In the hospital setting (Figure 6 in the middle), we investigated the socioenactive experience’s affective
aspects. The dynamics with children involved stuffed animals who communicated among themselves, could
be embraced, and responded differently depending on hug intensity. It also involved a narrative that
supported children’s actions and participatory sensemaking for the activity. In this scenario, we investigated
whether and how the socioenactive experience and its affective aspects positively impacted the children’s
relationship with the hospital environment (see Silva et al., 2022; Muriana et al., 2019; Hayashi et al., 2018).
For the exploratory museum (Figure 6 on the right), the “InstInt” installation illustrates the SawD that
graduate students, who co-designed the system and built the prototype, conducted. The process involved
exploring previous installations, collaborative sensemaking with SAwD artifacts (for ideation, problem
clarification, and requirements), and co-constructing the installation (sketching, physical prototyping, and
development). Researchers and an engineer then built a functional installation on a human scale: a carousel
with different size tapes hanging from it whose behavior (lights, sounds, and movements) depended on how
people acted with their bodies. People also found guidance in the installation’s and others’ actions (see
Baranauskas et al., 2021; Duarte et al., 2020, 2018).

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4.3.4 Lessons Learned and Contributions of (and to) SAwD
Creating technology in ubiquitous and pervasive scenarios, as in the Socioenactive project, relates closely
to designing configurations that enact certain phenomena (e.g., learning). These configurations (and
phenomena) are situated, fluid, and not random (Frauenberger, 2019). In this case, the relation between
technology and society presupposes a social-physical-digital tripartite coupling of being in the world.
SAwD raises several challenges when we create scenarios involving ubiquitous computing. We begin from
the assumption that enactive systems are not driven by a specific goal (Kaipainen et al., 2011) and do not
have a well-defined interaction space. Instead, an environment constituted by socioenactive systems is
open to the participants’ autonomous joint exploration of artifacts, driven by their perceptually guided action,
and their participatory sensemaking. While participants use different artifacts and techniques in SAwD
during the design process, the framework gives them room to further investigate methods and artifacts to
obtain assistance for configuring ubiquitous and pervasive environments in different settings. As a subject
for further investigation, design for intersubjectivity is a new concern when considering exploration as a
phenomenon that people also experience through others’ actions in scenarios that involve sensing, feeling,
and thinking (e.g., in a school setting, in a hospital, or in a museum).
5 Discussion and Unfolding
The projects that we discuss in Section 4 illustrate how we understand design’s social aspects. We define
design as a process of interaction among interested parties that results in participatory sensemaking for the
design product; we name this process socially aware design. In this section, we synthesize the answers to
our research questions in Section 1.
To answer RQ1, we refer readers to Section 5.1 where we highlight key aspects of the proposed approach
that pertain to technology design practice as a social phenomenon. We illustrate the main concepts
underlying SAwD and real-life projects that used SAwD in Section 4. To answer RQ2, we next discuss the
OpenDesign Platform (Section 5.2) and its possibilities for supporting human-technology-society coupling.
In Section 5.3, we briefly discuss the underlying aspects of some related approaches to situate our
contribution to the field.
5.1 Design as a Social Phenomenon: Some Takeaways
As new technological artifacts emerge, they change the environment in which people act together and may
lead them to question their existence in the world. Below, we highlight some key aspects underlying the
proposed technology-society coupling.
5.1.1 Autonomy
In the e-citizenship project, the participants' autonomy, as citizens in their world and as co-designers,
manifested itself in the way participants planned and conducted practices, how they participated, what
issues they discussed, and which solutions they proposed, created, experienced, delivered. The autonomy
notion here also draws on how Paulo Freire understands “emancipation” (Freire, 2000) and considers ways
of engaging people in making sense of technology from their social environments.
According to how Freire (2000) conceptualizes it, people do not “give” or “provide” emancipation; rather,
people themselves bring it forth from their (social) interaction with each other in their societies. In the e-
citizenship project, emancipation manifested itself in different forms and dimensions: from the way people
evolved in participation and autonomy in the semioparticipatory workshops to how they explored the
designed solutions and incorporated them into other aspects of their lives for different purposes and in other
contexts. Thus, social interaction underlies the SAwD design framework but goes beyond the design
process to provide access to digital information to people involved in or affected by technology. We aimed
to promote experiences where people exercise their autonomy not only in how they practically use digital
technology but also in their embodied technology-society coupling.
5.1.2 Circularity
Talking about technology in isolation from human actions lacks meaning. Drawing on Heidegger (1996),
meaning does not derive from mental representations of an objective reality but emerges from individuals'
participation in a socially shared context that involves beliefs, responsibilities, and commitments. One should
see the technology-design process as a process of interchange with the world. In designing and creating

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artifacts and systems, we design the domains in which perception and action can occur, which, in turn,
affects the world and our identity.
We can see how this mutual influence between people and the environment manifested in the projects that
we discuss in Section 4 in several ways and during their various design stages. For example, in the Pro-
iDTV project (see Section 4.2), workshops involved participants from various organizational sectors, and,
although they had no previous experience designing together, they converged ideas and strengths to create
their very first iDTV application. Their exchange with the design situation led them to social awareness (e.g.,
to recognize that TV audience members have different literacy levels and those differences’ implications),
which influenced them to rethink interactive digital technologies beyond their technological aspects in the
production chain and their own business organization.
5.1.3 Participatory Sensemaking
By participatory sensemaking, we mean coordinated intentional activity that occurs during interaction where
new social meaning-making domains not available to people on their own affect individuals’ meaning-
making processes (Froese & Di Paolo, 2011).
In the socioenactive systems project (see Section 4.3), when teachers received the proposal about a robot
that interacted with children in their educational scenario, there was not a predefined narrative for using it.
Teachers proposed one using the Little Red Riding Hood tale, which evolved based on the children’s
participation, feedback, and (embodied) actions towards the narrative and the robot’s and their peers’
actions, which led to new design cycles that involved designers, teachers, and children. In short, the
participants did not previously individually define (or drive) technology and its use and created the resulting
technology design (i.e., the enactive robot) through a participatory sensemaking process.
5.1.4 Design as Self-regulating Process
SAwD does not propose design as something in a designer’s (or even a user’s) mind. Rather, it proposes
that it results from a participatory sensemaking process that involves actions, artifacts, tools, and
technologies in a socially constructed environment. For example, when participants participate in design
practices in a semioparticipatory workshop, the artifacts they use and aspects such as body expressions,
gesturing, and engaging represent fundamental elements for the signification process. These elements lead
people to dynamically rethink how we plan, prepare, and execute design activities with interested parties.
In sum, SAwD views design as an evolving “living system” and supports the design process by providing
methods and artifacts for people to effectively handle its ever-changing interactive aspect. In this process,
one can observe participants’ autonomy and participatory sensemaking in their exchanges with the social,
physical, and digital environment, which characterizes the design process’s circularity.
5.2 SAwD’s Unfolding with OpenDesign
In a research project entitled “OpenDesign: Techniques and Artifacts for the Socially Aware Design of
Computer Systems”, we investigated concepts, practices, and solutions for practicing SAwD online on an
open scale through a Web platform
6
. We conducted OpenDesign due to inspiration from the open-source
code phenomenon and from the idea of providing an equivalent for activities that precede coding (from
ideation to requirements and system design).
OpenDesign unfolds the SAwD framework in two complementary modes. First, we conducted the project
from the SAwD perspective, and different professionals participated in the design activities during
workshops that several artifacts that aligned scientific investigation, social practices, and technical system
design mediated. Second, the project expanded SAwD in scope and diversity and increased its operational
reach. The SAwD framework both characterized the OpenDesign project and was expanded by it.
When taken to the open design level, which the OpenDesign platform enabled, SAwD’s dimensions
expanded significantly. Design context can be both online and anywhere, distributed, inclusive, and diverse.
As such, we could apply and people could access SAwD in quite different places and situations (whether
educational, academic, industrial, or social settings). SAwD can reach and involve people in their possible
diversity. Anyone with access to a computer and the Internet can engage in a design project. Projects can
6
https://opendesign.ic.unicamp.br/ last access 6 March 2023.

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effectively engage interested parties’ representatives on broader scales from enthusiasts and domain and
technical experts to people who need or may use the designed solution.
One can apply SAwD when online and open to create various different products, and it can help people to
understand problems and propose solutions (either computational or not). The platform can mediate
workshops that occur in both virtual and physical places. Time, space, and participant number do not pose
any limitations since people across the world can participate in synchronous or asynchronous activities,
debate, deliberate, and contribute. Finally, besides the basic artifacts that SAwD provides, some users of
the OpenDesign platform have begun designing other artifacts to support different system-design stages
(from understanding problems to evaluating solutions). For example, some researchers have developed
artifacts to support design rationale, consolidation, human values in design, and begun integrating them into
the platform.
Taking the COVID-19 pandemic as an example, an extreme situation that widely impacted our life as a
society and human beings, one could use SAwD to support online and open problem understanding either
on a global or local scale with vastly different people (from health experts and governments to volunteers
and representatives from society). These people bring their different backgrounds and demands to construct
a shared understanding of critical problems for their specific contexts. Design problems need not necessarily
be predefined; they may emerge from social practices that artifacts mediate exposing what is important and
necessary for these people.
In summary, we developed the OpenDesign project under the SAwD framework as an opportunity to
combine the latter’s ideas with practices that open-source software circles already recognized and to provide
an online platform for systems design as an open practice. Currently, the platform offers the three primary
artifacts of SAwD that Figure 3 shows, while researchers have begun to propose and integrate other
artifacts, such as an instrument to evaluate system access in ubiquitous scenarios (Pimenta et al., 2022).
Some design cases have already used the platform (Gonçalves & Baranauskas, 2021; Reis et al., 2020;
Gonçalves et al., 2020), and the platform remains open to contributions and new research.
5.3 SAwD and Related Approaches to Design
As we illustrate in Section 2, systems design approaches implicitly or explicitly address different social
understandings for the active presence of people in the design process and their values, power, and
organization. In this section, we briefly situate SAwD among some approaches considered noteworthy in
related literature: participatory design, value-sensitive design, design thinking, and organizational semiotics.
Participatory design (PD) research has long involved people in the design process. The original
Scandinavian rationale behind it proposed that everyone should have the opportunity to participate in
decisions concerning their life (Ehn, 1993). PD has sought to incorporate users in the design and intervene
in situations of conflict by developing more democratic processes (Bannon et al., 2018). PD has transformed
over the years following the changes its practitioners experimented with in their worlds. Literature from the
last decade has shown strategies to conduct participatory activities, practices, experiences, and methods
to address vulnerable or excluded communities: the design with (and for) people with disabilities (e.g.,
Galliers et al., 2012; Kanstrup & Bertelsen, 2016; Branco et al., 2016; Bossavit & Parsons, 2016; Makhaeva
et al., 2016; Pita et al., 2017; Bonacin et al., 2019), older adults (e.g., Leong & Robertson, 2016; Duque et
al., 2019), and excluded communities (e.g., Leung et al., 2010; Schultz et al., 2020; Agid, 2016). More
recently, the PD community has focused on continuing to be interventionist, political, and knowledge
producing (Bannon et al., 2018) while working towards a desirable view of the present and near future.
SAwD entrusts interested parties with the capacity for design and promotes (and supports) their committed
involvement in technology design as PD preconizes. Unlike PD, a phenomenological understanding of the
human-technology-society relation that draws on participatory sensemaking underlies the SAwD’s
(co)design process. In practical terms, design situations we call semioparticipatory workshops enable
interest parties to understand a technological artifact in a shared way and enact its codesign.
Beyond PD's “essential” values (democracy, participation, etc.), since the early 2000s, the topic of human
values in computing has gained attention from different fields and notably the HCI field (Sellen et al., 2009;
Stephanidis et al., 2019). Proposed by Friedman (1996), value-sensitive design (VSD) adopts an integrative
and iterative tripartite methodology and covers conceptual, empirical, and technical investigations that favor
moral discussions in technology development (Miller et al., 2007; Yetim, 2011). Value-sensitive design
focuses intensely on values related to a specific technology and its use context leading stakeholders’
attention to possible benefits and harms of system solutions. More recently, value-sensitive design

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community initiatives revealed an intention to develop the approach with the goal to inform it with ethical
theory (Friedman et al., 2021). In a recent systematic mapping to identify how research has operationalized
human values in software, Shahin et al. (2021) mapped more than 50 scientific studies mainly from HCI and
software engineering venues. The mapping revealed that researchers have used diverse approaches to
consider values in design. The studies covered different activities and software-development stages, such
as requirements, implementation, testing, and team organization. Shahin et al. also found few studies
concerned with values’ theoretical or philosophical issues but strongly emphasized solution proposal or
evaluation.
Consistent with SAwD, VSD focuses on human values that different stakeholders bring to the design
context, but VSD focuses on predetermined values rather than values that may emerge from the design
context through co-design practices. While our approach does not focus on values as VSD does, SAwD
understands and treats values implicitly or explicitly: they underlie the interactions between people in
semioparticipatory workshops or some artifacts explicitly support them (Pereira & Baranauskas, 2015;
Pereira et al., 2018; Piccolo & Pereira, 2019). Moreover, we acknowledge that values as attention objects
demand a theoretical and philosophical posture, a view of being in the world that design approaches should
explicitly state.
As for design thinking (DT), it has gained popularity in the last years, and researchers have often presented
it as a new paradigm for solving problems creatively. The term dates from the 1980s (Rowe, 1987) and
researchers have applied it extensively both as a label to represent “lots of disparate vaguely creative
activities” and a “specific and deliberate way of reasoning” (Dorst, 2010, p.138). Researchers usually
present DT in its many variations as a process in which stages focus on defining and solving problems
linearly: from gaining empathy for a problem to prototyping and testing solutions. Because DT favors quick
and easy-to-conduct activities, researchers have considered its capacity to popularize a deep and thin form
of design as its most substantial value (Kolko, 2018).
DT favors interaction and prioritizes easy-to-use methods and artifacts for an audience that does not
necessarily have technical knowledge, and it is a linear process for understanding and solving problems.
As Buchanan (1992) argued, the DT linear model favors problems with definite conditions, and the
designers' task is to identify such conditions precisely and then produce a solution. DT offers user-centered
methods and practices but they do not necessarily require active user participation. In contrast, SAwD offers
a flexible non-linear model with design artifacts and practices that recognize a fundamental indeterminacy
and the situatedness character of design problems, which reflect its nature as a tool for participatory
sensemaking, autonomy, circularity, and self-regulating processes.
Organizational semiotics (OS) provides methods and artifacts to model organizations as systems of signs.
From a subjectivist view, requirements involve the technological platform and the human system in which a
system of norms influences agents. As Stamper (2000) emphasized, these norms need not be written (or
something we can get our hands on); they concern people’s tendency to behave in a certain way in certain
situations as if they were “force fields”. The environment and the social context in which they exist influence
them. By understanding this norm system, organizational semiotics focuses on designing artifacts that can
represent how people create, interpret, and share the signs in organizational contexts.
While OS focuses mainly on modeling organizations’ signs, in SAwD, we use artifacts as a means for
communication to develop meaning-making. During a semioparticipatory workshop, for example, the
semiotic ladder does not represent the final artifact to produce a means to raise discussion and facilitate
interaction between participants. Participants discuss requirements modeled at the ladder’s social level to
develop a common understanding of a socio-political situation. In the end, the process will hopefully achieve
synergy among human and technical systems.
Table 2 summarizes the above approaches’ key characteristics and contrasts them with SAwD. With this
table, we do not mean to exhaustively describe each approach, which may have intersections and other
differences between them, but to contrast them regarding participants’ roles, their methods and practices,
their design artifacts, and the expected outcomes from a design project.

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Table 2. Key Characteristics of Related Approaches
Participants’ roles
Key methods and
practices
Key design
artifacts
Key expected
outcome
PD
Interventionist, political,
and knowledge-producing
toward a desirable view of
the present and near
future
Participatory practices
with workers, excluded
communities, and other
interested parties
Flexible artifacts
produced in different
stages of design
Democracy in the design,
Quality and user acceptance,
Desirable view of the present
and near future
VSD
Direct and indirect
stakeholders, partners, or
consultant
Stakeholder analysis,
ethnography, interviews,
modeling, prototyping
Envisioning cards,
value sketches,
stakeholder tokens,
value-oriented
prototype
Value-informed solutions and
awareness of stakeholders’
values and their tensions
DT
Subject to be studied,
partner, consultant, or
source of information
Brainstorming sessions,
surveys, interviews,
natural observation
Personas, empathy
map, prototypes
Fast-proposed solutions and
rapid prototypes to solve a
given problem in a creative
way
OS
Consultant on the
development of semiotic-
based artifacts
Methods for eliciting,
analyzing, and specifying
user requirements
(MEASUR)
Semiotic-based
artifacts, e.g.,
semiotic ladder,
ontology chart, norm
analysis method
Understanding the
organizational information
system (technological or not)
as a system of signs
SAwD
Meaning-makers for
technological artifacts, co-
designers, sensitive to the
socio-political situation
through design
Semioparticipatory
workshops using artifacts
through which people
interact and co-develop
the design situation itself
Co-created artifacts
that express
requirements, values
and meaning-making
for the technology
Synergies among human and
technical systems, by the study
of how the organisms (human,
social group) enact their
environment (including
technological artifacts) in
society
We conceived of SAwD and it evolved from existing approaches in combination to cope with challenging
contexts regarding diverse people, socioeconomic inequalities, and resource and technological
infrastructure limitations. SAwD's originality does not lie in a specific process or practice but in how it
combines and operationalizes its elements.
The cases in Table 1 evidence these SAwD characteristics. For example, the Village on the Net system’s
general designed structure (e-citizenship project) included organization based on “services, ideas, and
products”, which participants developed based on the socio-political situation (e.g., the need to develop a
local economy) and the way in which participants understood social network technology (Baranauskas et
al., 2013; Neris et al., 2012). Semioparticipatory workshops in Pro-IDTV, for instance, resulted in an
interactive digital TV application that prioritized awareness of “the other”, which did not exist in other
solutions from the same organization that focused on development productivity and used software
engineering as guidance. SAwD artifacts that focused on developing sensemaking expressed this need for
awareness (Buchdid et al., 2019). Finally, we highlight environments that seek synergy between human and
technology in the socioenactive systems project. The social-physical-digital coupling is expressed, for
instance, in an enactive environment in the learning context. In that scenario, children enacted with each
other in an open technological environment and coordinate their actions to guide a robot to move in a way
they wanted. This example illustrates our design objective to construct technological environments where
human organisms enact a social context; a process that a specific goal in a well-defined interaction space
did not drive (Baranauskas et al., 2021; Caceffo et al., 2022; Valente et al., 2021) but that enabled a solution
to emerge made that environment possible.
In summary, SAwD is characterized by the shared construction of meaning for technological artifacts, by
those involved in the design process. To this end, semioparticipatory workshops allow people to interact
and co-develop the design situation itself using artifacts to express requirements and values and understand
technology. SAwD’s expected outcome differs from others since it focuses on achieving synergies among
human and technical systems via studying how the organisms (human, social group) enact their
environment in society (including technological artifacts).

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6 Conclusion
Computing technology’s ubiquity and pervasiveness over the past decade have shown societal challenges
(e.g., justice, sustainability, ethics, peace) that demand we examine how we approach computer-based
systems design. In this paper, we view technology design’s conceptual aspects from a cross-disciplinary
perspective that we ground in a social way to understand the design process. Accordingly, we propose a
framework for design called socially aware design (SAwD) to allow participatory sensemaking among people
involved in design situations. We illustrate the framework in different design contexts and show how one
can treat the socially aware perspective operationally in the design process. Finally, we discuss key
concepts and practical concerns underlying the proposed human-technology-society coupling as a social
phenomenon in design.
Our and others’ experiences with SAwD as well as the results from research and practice with SAwD, which
we illustrate in this paper, have shown that our framework raises essential aspects underlying design as a
self-regulatory process: autonomy, circularity, and participatory sensemaking. These aspects make room
for new research agendas that can shed light on some issues in the systems and software engineering field
with more in-depth discussion. For example, while design context, people, products, and environments
(practices and artifacts) constantly change due to mutual influences from people and the environment,
design seen through this dynamic system remains open to further examination. Also, technology-enhanced
physical environments (e.g., smart environments) could benefit from the same conceptual background to
shed light on the socio-physical scenario’s affordances and potentially address accountability and ethical
issues. To address ethical issues in technology design, a shared view of responsibilities in creating
technology and a collection of artifacts, techniques, methods, and attitudes would serve as foundations for
acting out a better world for all through technology.
Acknowledgments
We thank our institutions, research groups, colleagues, and students. The first author gratefully
acknowledges a productivity scholarship from the Brazilian Council for Scientific and Technological
Development (CNPq #304708/2020-8, #309442/2023-0). We acknowledge research grants from The São
Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP): #2015/16528-0 and #2015/24300-9. We express our gratitude to
all the participants of the research projects we have worked with.

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About the Authors
Maria Cecília Calani Baranauskas is a Full Professor at the University of Campinas (UNICAMP), Brazil,
collaborating in the Institute of Computing. She holds a PhD in Electrical Engineering at UNICAMP. Her
research interests include topics in human-computer interaction, particularly aspects of designing
educational and societal systems, leading several research projects in the theme. She is an honorary
member of the Brazilian Academy of Educational Technology and Member of the Governing Board of
UNESCO Institute for Information Technology in Education (IITE). Senior Lecturer of The Brazilian
Computing Society (SBC), she is one of the authors of the very first HCI book written in Brazilian Portuguese.
She has also served the Technical Committee on Human-Computer Interaction (TC13) Board of IFIP as the
Brazilian Representative. She has received different national and international awards throughout her
career, such as the Diploma of Educational Merit “Prof. Darcy Ribeiro” (2006), the ACM SIGDOC Rigo
Award (2010), the first HCI Outstanding HCI Career Award (2015), the Academic Recognition “Zeferino
Vaz” (2016), and the ACM SIGCHI Social Impact Award (2021).
Roberto Pereira is a Professor at the Department of Informatics, Federal University of Paraná (UFPR),
Brazil. He holds a PhD in Computer Science at the University of Campinas. His main research interests are
related to Human Values and Culture in technology design, Design of computing solutions in challenging
scenarios, and Computing Education. He is one proponent of VCIA—a value-oriented and culturally
informed approach to the design of interactive systems. He has served as a member of the special Human
Computer Interaction committee in Brazil and as Associate Editor for the Brazilian Journal on Computers in
Education. Currently, he is Editor-in-Chief of the Journal on Interactive Systems (JIS) and the Horizontes
Magazine, both maintained by the Brazilian Computing Society, and Associate Editor of the ACM Journal
on Responsible Computing. In 2022, he received the Outstanding Associate of the Year Award from the
Brazilian Computing Society.
Rodrigo Bonacin is a Senior Researcher and Head of Computing Methodologies Division at CTI Renato
Archer, and professor at UNIFACCAMP, Brazil. He holds a BSc and a MSc in Computer Science from the
Federal University of Paraná (UFPR), and a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Campinas
(UNICAMP), Brazil, and Postdoctorate by the Luxembourg Institute of Science and Technology. His
research interests include human-computer interaction, the semantic Web, artificial intelligence,
organizational semiotics, informatics in education, and medical informatics.
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Fiona Nah, City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR
Advisory Board
Izak Benbasat, University of British Columbia, Canada
John M. Carroll, Penn State University, USA
Dennis F. Galletta, University of Pittsburgh, USA
Shirley Gregor, National Australian University, Australia
Elena Karahanna, University of Georgia, USA
Paul Benjamin Lowry, Virginia Tech, USA
Jenny Preece, University of Maryland, USA
Gavriel Salvendy, University of Central Florida, USA
Suprateek Sarker, University of Virginia, USA
Ben Shneiderman, University of Maryland, USA
Joe Valacich, University of Arizona, USA
Jane Webster, Queen's University, Canada
K.K. Wei, Singapore Institute of Management, Singapore
Ping Zhang, Syracuse University, USA
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Fred Davis, Texas Tech University, USA
Gert-Jan de Vreede, University of South Florida, USA
Soussan Djamasbi, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, USA
Traci Hess, University of Massachusetts Amherst, USA
Shuk Ying (Susanna) Ho, Australian National University, Australia
Matthew Jensen, University of Oklahoma, USA
Richard Johnson, Washington State University, USA
Atreyi Kankanhalli, National University of Singapore, Singapore
Jinwoo Kim, Yonsei University, Korea
Eleanor Loiacono, College of William & Mary, USA
Anne Massey, University of Massachusetts Amherst, USA
Gregory D. Moody, University of Nevada Las Vegas, USA
Stacie Petter, Baylor University, USA
Marshall Scott Poole, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA
Lionel Robert, University of Michigan, USA
Choon Ling Sia, City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR
Heshan Sun, University of Oklahoma, USA
Kar Yan Tam, Hong Kong U. of Science & Technology, Hong Kong SAR
Chee-Wee Tan, Copenhagen Business School, Denmark
Dov Te'eni, Tel-Aviv University, Israel
Jason Thatcher, Temple University, USA
Noam Tractinsky, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel
Viswanath Venkatesh, University of Arkansas, USA
Heng Xu, American University, USA
Mun Yi, Korea Advanced Institute of Science & Technology, Korea
Dongsong Zhang, University of North Carolina Charlotte, USA
Lina Zhou, University of North Carolina Charlotte, USA
Editorial Board
Miguel Aguirre-Urreta, Florida International University, USA
Michel Avital, Copenhagen Business School, Denmark
Gaurav Bansal, University of Wisconsin-Green Bay, USA
Ricardo Buettner, University of Bayreuth, Germany
Langtao Chen, Missouri University of Science and Technology, USA
Christy M.K. Cheung, Hong Kong Baptist University, Hong Kong SAR
Tsai-Hsin Chu, National Chiayi University, Taiwan
Cecil Chua, Missouri University of Science and Technology, USA
Constantinos Coursaris, HEC Montreal, Canada
Michael Davern, University of Melbourne, Australia
Carina de Villiers, University of Pretoria, South Africa
Gurpreet Dhillon, University of North Texas, USA
Alexandra Durcikova, University of Oklahoma, USA
Andreas Eckhardt, University of Innsbruck, Austria
Brenda Eschenbrenner, University of Nebraska at Kearney, USA
Xiaowen Fang, DePaul University, USA
James Gaskin, Brigham Young University, USA
Matt Germonprez, University of Nebraska at Omaha, USA
Jennifer Gerow, Virginia Military Institute, USA
Suparna Goswami, Technische U.München, Germany
Camille Grange, HEC Montreal, Canada
Yi Maggie Guo, University of Michigan-Dearborn, USA
Juho Harami, Tampere University, Finland
Khaled Hassanein, McMaster University, Canada
Milena Head, McMaster University, Canada
Netta Iivari, Oulu University, Finland
Zhenhui Jack Jiang, University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR
Weiling Ke, Southern University of Science and Technology, China
Sherrie Komiak, Memorial U. of Newfoundland, Canada
Yi-Cheng Ku, Fu Chen Catholic University, Taiwan
Na Li, Baker College, USA
Yuan Li, University of Tennessee, USA
Ji-Ye Mao, Renmin University, China
Scott McCoy, College of William and Mary, USA
Tom Meservy, Brigham Young University, USA
Stefan Morana, Saarland University, Germany
Robert F. Otondo, Mississippi State University, USA
Lingyun Qiu, Peking University, China
Sheizaf Rafaeli, University of Haifa, Israel
Rene Riedl, Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria
Khawaja Saeed, Kennesaw State University, USA
Shu Schiller, Wright State University, USA
Christoph Schneider, IESE Business School, Spain
Theresa Shaft, University of Oklahoma, USA
Stefan Smolnik, University of Hagen, Germany
Jeff Stanton, Syracuse University, USA
Horst Treiblmaier, Modul University Vienna, Austria
Ozgur Turetken, Toronto Metropolitan University, Canada
Wietske van Osch, HEC Montreal, Canada
Weiquan Wang, Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR
Dezhi Wu, University of South Carolina, USA
Nannan Xi, Tampere University, Finland
Fahri Yetim, FOM U. of Appl. Sci., Germany
Cheng Zhang, Fudan University, China
Meiyun Zuo, Renmin University, China
Managing Editor
Gregory D. Moody, University of Nevada Las Vegas, USA
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