A Socio-Technical Framework for Collaborative Product Development

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.