Social Practice Design (spd): Paths to Organisational Change Based on Counselling and Phenomenology, Using Rogers’ Human Actualising Tendency, and Ciborra’s Improvisation, Mood, and Bricolage

Our proposal for Social Practice Design (SPD), i.e., the design of social practices – in itself a social design activity -, seeks to ensure that the potential benefits of novel technologies can be realized, by increasing the bias towards the social in Information Systems Development (ISD), with the use of guiding principles from phenomenology, and design oriented approach to novel social practices. SPD is a form of action oriented research. It can be considered an extension of Participatory Design (PD) approaches to the implementation phase of IS. It regards the concept and participative introduction of new things to do, or of new ways to do things, in order to make place for technology (Ehn 2006). SPD is based on PD, and on Carl Rogers’ ‘Person Centred Approach’, from counselling, and it entails a phenomenology based philosophy standing, providing ethnography, guiding principles from social theories, the conception of visions of solution, the co-construction of intervention projects, together with the central actors of the scene: managers and personnel / IT users. The phenomenology base of SPD is granted by its deep roots in the work of Claudio Ciborra, the prominent author in transporting Heidegger’s thought to ISD.