Sociology in machines: applying sociology to software design

Applied sociology is usually taken to mean the application of sociological theories and findings to issues of social policy. In this paper, we present some examples of a quite different notion of applied sociology: one in which sociological insights are applied to the design of computer software. Sociology’s primary concern as a discipline can be considered to be the study of the interaction of agents, where ‘agents’ are generally assumed to be people or human collectivities. The kind of application of sociology which we discuss trades on the possibility of widening the scope of agency to include non-animate systems. The success of this kind of applied sociology will depend in part on the degree to which artifacts can be considered to be agents susceptible to sociological analysis. This is a question which has been exercising philosophers for many years. Rather than joining directly in this debate, we illustrate the possibilities and difficulties with examples of the application of sociological insights to their design. One example is a project, now almost complete, to develop a knowledge-based system for public use. The interaction between computer and user is controlled by a set of rules which are derived from some of the basic findings of conversation analysts. Another project, still in its early stages, is developing a module for a computer-based telephone information enquiry system which will monitor the oral dialogue between a caller and the computer and will generate the computer’s side of the ‘conversation’. The design of this module will also be influenced by the findings of conversation analysis of human-human dialogues. As a third example, we point to the potential of computer simulations of collectivities of agents for illuminating issues in sociological theory.