Social Science Contributions to Engineering Projects: Looking Beyond Explicit Knowledge Through the Lenses of Social Theory

With this paper, we will illustrate the synergetic potential of interdisciplinary research by demonstrating how socio-scientific perspectives can serve engineering purposes and contribute to engineering assignments. This especially concerns eliciting knowledge models and ergonomically optimizing technological design. For this purpose, we report on our findings on socio-technical arrangements within smart factory research initiatives that are part of the IMPROVE project. We focus our findings on the systemic interplay between the formally modelled plant, its actual physical state and the social environment. We also look at how operators, as parts of the plant’s environment, adapt themselves and thereby develop their own particular work culture. We then integrate these findings by reconstructing this operator work culture as a specific way of performing, accounting for and addressing particular issues. We enhance these findings using the lenses of recent concepts developed in the field of social theory, namely the praxeological understanding of tacit knowledge, systems theory differentiations and an actor-network-theory understanding of human-machine agency. Applying these concepts from social theory, we revisit our empirical findings and integrate them to provide context-sensitive, socioscientifically informed suggestions for engineering research on knowledge models concerning HMI design.