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It has been suggested that “space and artifacts constitute systems of communication which organizations build up within themselves” (Gagliardi, 1992a, b, p. vi) and reflect the cultural life within that organization. This is a study of how the “landscape” of a public library (“Library X”), as an information retrieval system, relates to the values of the people who created it. The efforts here are geared towards understanding the physical instantiation of institutional culture and, more specifically, institutional values as they are reflected through the artifact.

This chapter is focused on the specification and integration of intercultural variables for human machine systems and the description of content analysis for these variables. Starting with basics of culture-oriented design, these are followed by an approach to machine localization issues and a cost model, then basics of the intercultural design and human machine system engineering process, a definition and specification of intercultural variables, a systematic treatment for their integration into the process, and a description of how to use these variables in the process. Finally, an example of an intercultural variables approach to “information coding” in a human-machine system is presented for China and Germany.

The digital transformation calls for new thinking about sociotechnical systems design (STSD) because it has enabled new kinds of work systems to proliferate. We identify a new class of sociotechnical system, called the Platform-STS (P-STS), which complements the existing Industrial- and Knowledge-STSs. The P-STS has distinctive characteristics compared to the other classes because it reaches directly into ecosystems and is, therefore, “distributed,” and because it is governed through market mechanisms rather than hierarchy or clan mechanisms. We introduce a new design principle, redundancy of connectivity, to ground design thinking about the P-STS. We demonstrate why fundamental STSD principles need to be reconfigured, suggest how they might do so, and conclude that socioecological designs and interventions may need to supplant sociotechnical ones.

In order for an information system (IS) to be sustainable, it must create value for its shareholders and for the society at large. We believe it is both possible and recommended that systems designers approach the design of systems thoughtfully, using a positive lens, to develop systems that not only increase profit but also add to the well-being of all. We have also observed that a systems designer can approach an organization with an open mind, accept the organization's set of values, adopt a positive design attitude, and still develop a system that is not sustainable. In this study, we looked to see whether there was an additional factor, one based in the environment created by governments that influenced the sustainability of systems. Since previous research shows that observing the predominant metaphors found in organizations can help explain the success or failure of different types of ISs, we attempted to do the same for societal metaphors. We identify the orientation, attitudes, and limits of various forms of government and demonstrate their similarities to the primary organizational metaphors. We then propose that the type of government may influence the sustainability of ISs and further argue that systems designers need to be aware of how forms of government affect the design of ISs and their sustainability.

Rather than organize as traditional firms, many of today’s companies organize as platforms that sit at the nexus of multiple exchange and production relationships. This chapter considers a most basic question of organization in platform contexts: the choice of boundaries. Herein, I investigate how classical economic theories of firm boundaries apply to platform-based organization and empirically study how executives made boundary choices in response to changing market and technical challenges in the early mobile computing industry (the predecessor to today’s smartphones). Rather than a strict or unavoidable tradeoff between “openness-versus-control,” most successful platform owners chose their boundaries in a way to simultaneously open-up to outside developers while maintaining coordination across the entire system.