Advancing Socio-Technical Systems Design Via the Living Laboratory

The natural, living world provides the backdrop for the practice of participatory ergonomics. By addressing the salient issues of complexity, context, distributed cognition, and team situational awareness in this world, the advocation of the Living Laboratory concept is presented. Socio-technical systems design is reflected through the joint integration of various Living-Lab outcomes such as Fields of practice, tools, technologies, qualitative models, scaled worlds, and in situ evaluations. A wholistic approach is derived by looking at these outcomes as a basis to bind together the cognitive, social, technological, and organizational constraints that design must consider to be effective.