DOI: 10.4018/IJSS.2016010101 Copyright © 2016, IGI Global. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI Global is prohibited. International Journal of Systems and Society Volume 3 • Issue 1 • January-June 2016 An Exploration of Resilience and Values in the Co-Design of Sociotechnical Systems Balbir Barn, Middlesex University, London, UK Ravinder Barn, Royal Holloway, University of London, Egham, UK ABSTRACT The notion of resilience is becoming an important consideration in addressing the needs of vulnerable individuals and groups in the public sector. In Information Systems development, resilience has often been treated as a non-functional requirement such as scalability and little or no work has aimed at building resilience in end-users through systems development. Sociotechnical approaches while not specifically addressing resilience, have strived for a balance between technology and humans. While there are many variants of sociotechnical approaches, in this paper the authors introduce a refinement of the value sensitive action-reflection model used in co-design, first introduced by Yoo et al, that recognises the tension between values and resilience. The authors report on their activities of using this approach for a project aimed at developing mobile apps for promoting better engagement between young people in conflict with the law and their case workers in the UK youth justice system. They examine the ambiguity created when designer and stakeholder prompts change their role and purpose during the co-design process and discuss the impact of this on resilience building for the end-user and the possible implications for Information Systems design processes. KEywoRDS Co-Design Process, Information Systems, Resilience, Sociotechnical Systems, Values INTRoDUCTIoN Today’s Information Systems are driven by the need for ubiquitous availability in a hyper-connected world. In such a context, information systems may collect or curate data from sensors, and make processed information available on mobile devices utilising connectivity through wifi or mobile data connections. A consequence of this is a new and possibly unsustainable demand on the need to preserve key human (moral) values such as privacy, security and autonomy whose loss may have a detrimental effect of the resilience of end-users. So it becomes incumbent on designers of information systems to ensure that stakeholders can make adequate representations of their value concerns as part of the design process. This is a formulation that has parallels to the optimisation (between technical and social systems) explicitly developed in the sociotechnical approach advocated by Mumford (1983). However, the challenge of involving users and their values in the design process is manifestly difficult and the nuances of how values of security / privacy and autonomy become incorporated into the design process remains an on-going problem. Mumford, reflecting on the sociotechnical approach similarly recognises the same challenge (Mumford, 2006). Critically, the domain in which information systems may be introduced can also attenuate these challenges. Hence, information systems aimed at end-users from marginalised or largely excluded communities can make these challenges particularly difficult. 1