Community Informatics Design Applied to Digital Social Systems: Communicational Foundations, Theories and Methodologies - Hardcover

by Pierre-Léonard Harvey (Author), Virginie Bucco (Translator)

Back Jacket

This book introduces a Digital Social System Praxis Framework (DSSPF) integrating Computational Media, Evolutionary Systems Thinking and Design Thinking approaches to E-transformation practice, also called Community Informatics Design (CID). The DSSPF framework is intended to create communication spaces dedicated to knowledge production and sharing for social and organizational change. It allows social systems researchers and practitioners to recognize their synergistic roles in the praxis process to shape their future through social innovation projects. This transdisciplinary text provides potential students and practitioners fundamental concepts and tools for such design. It offers resources from the Pragmatic and Systemic philosophy of science for the co-construction of social architectures and infrastructures, and multi-aspectual design methodologies by which government, organizations and civil society can learn to ethically co-design common ground. This approach provides complementary and common patterns from known methods, models, and theories of social systems interventions that could support a generic framing of large scale sociotechnical systems: digital social innovation ecosystem, living Labs, Fab Labs, enterprise collaborative networks.
There will be a particular focus on understanding and addressing the dimensions that make people from different communities of practice able to communicate and collaborate through multiple digital media, design platforms, worldviews and modeling approaches.

Author Biography

Pierre-Léonard Harvey studied Communication and Media at University of Ottawa (Bachelor), University of Strasbourg (Master degree) and University of Montreal (Ph.D). He completed his Master's thesis on pedagogy, social psychology and Information and Communication Technology under the direction of Abraham Moles in France in 1981. He also possess a Ph.D degree from the University of Montreal. His 1993 doctoral thesis was on virtual communities modeling and design, social informatics and ICT in the spirit of Rob Kling's socio-technical work. In 1995, he completed further studies on new media and applied communication theory for change in organizational communication. His work on virtual communities applied to e-learning and organization studies in the French speaking worlds are well cited in many peer-reviewed papers and books.In 1993 he became a full professor at University of Quebec in Montreal (UQAM) and in 2000 he founded the Applied Community Informatics Design Laboratory(ACIL) of the Communication Faculty in UQAM. In 2001, he was also a founder and an a research axis coordinator of Hexagram, an Institute for research/Creation in Media Arts and Technologies. In 2009 Harvey was elected as the Director of the Joint Ph.D program in Communication among the university consortium UQAM, Concordia University and University of Montreal. In the Summer of 2010, Prof. Harvey received an invitation to teach and create a first master class course on Design Thinking at the Department Medien Wissenchaft, Bayreuth University, Germany. Since June 2013, he has been an affiliate professor at ÉCHOFAB, an open innovation space and initiative of Communautique Inc., which was the first Canadian Fab Lab to be accredited by MIT in 2011. Since 2015, he has been a research collaborator of The School of Management (ESG UQAM) Ivanhoé Cambridge Real Estate Chair--a research-innovation university chair dedicated to developing knowledge and skills in Real Estate and collaborative spaces--a research collaboration which also includes a role as a scientific coordinator in the Sensorial Design laboratory (D-Sense lab). In 2017, he was elected Scientific Advisor for the Quebec's Digital Governance Institute in Canada, an NPO dedicated to the co-creation of an innovation ecosystem platform for the province of Quebec.He is a researcher/member of the International Network of UNESCO Chairs in Communication (ORBICOM) since 2003.