Socio-technicality, Human Work Interaction Design (HWID), and Work Engagement

In this talk we will theorize about a sociotechnical approach to HCI design for work engagement. We explain how work engagement increasingly is important in HCI design research and industrial practice as evidenced by recent proposals for new design frameworks for work engagement. Learning from the sociotechnical tradition, however, tells us that looking at work engagement only or mainly from a technical design side is the wrong way to go; instead the social and the technical need to be considered on an equal footing. We give the theoretical motivation and background in sociotechnical thinking for our proposal to use Human Work Interaction Design (HWID) to theorize about work engagement in HCI design. We explain the HWID framework, and briefly talk about how theorize different cases. The promise is a sociotechnical, social-relativistic conceptualization of work engagement for HCI design, which can be used to facilitate and relate users’ and designers’ evolving views of work engagement.