A Socio-Technical Framework for Collaborative Product Development

Abstract

Human behavior dynamics impact technical decisions that cause societal changes, which, in turn, shape social dynamics to influence future technical decisions. This paper presents a socio-technical framework, based on the Engineering as Collaborative Negotiation paradigm. Collaborative product development is viewed as a socially mediated technical activity aiming to achieve a human purpose and modeled as a dynamic co-construction process, where stakeholders’ perspectives continuously evolve to form a share reality through collaborative negotiations. The paper introduces the socio-technical framework, the socio-technical co-construction process, and its software implementation. It also reports the applications of this research in the facility planning and development domain.