Socially Aware Design Workshop to Discover Socio-Technical Requirements: Planning, Execution, and Results

This innovative practice article describes how society is transforming its daily life due to advances in Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), which primarily affect how people interact and perform their functions at work, home, and even leisure time. The social impacts must be perceived before they become a problem, meaning that during the conception (design) of an Information System (IS), social, cultural, environmental, and legal aspects must be considered to define sociotechnical requirements. Traditional requirements gathering does not address the above, resulting in less inclusive and less sustainable systems that may negatively impact society. This research presents the execution of a Socially Aware Design (SAwD) workshop to uncover sociotechnical requirements for designing an interactive game aimed at teaching Software Engineering, applying techniques, and generating artifacts proposed by SAwD. Design theory addresses techniques and artifacts that contribute to IS construction, and organizational culture theory studies the behavior and values of a group of people. Planning and execution of a semi-participatory design workshop divided into three phases. The first phase uses brainstorming to build artifacts: stakeholder diagram, evaluation framework, value cake, and semiotic ladder. The second phase employs brain writing to collaboratively build the game, and the third phase uses braindrawing to prototype the game. With active participation from workshop participants, it was possible to generate all planned artifacts with content that effectively contributed to the game prototype, considering the semiotic ladder's social aspects and defined requirements. A quantitative and qualitative analysis of workshop results is presented. The number of participants, completion time, and generated requirements contributed to quantitative analysis, while observation and participant experience reporting contributed to qualitative analysis. This research contributes to the dissemination of techniques and artifacts proposed by SAwD and provides a step-by-step guide to their application in the pursuit of sociotechnical requirements, essential for the construction of inclusive, sustainable, and effective IS.