Designing A Social Machine For The Heart Manual Service

Social machines are emerging as a focus of research within the field of informatics as they begin to become the central administrator of our everyday communications. The difficulty of applying such systems to specialised contexts, such as healthcare, calls for guidelines on how to design them, so that they become truly useful. In collaboration with the Heart Manual Department, this project is an attempt at finding suitable methods for designing social machines in a healthcare context. It suggests that adopting a participatory approach where stakeholders are active, equal participants throughout the design process leads to a more usable, likeable, and thus more successful social machine. We describe the process of designing a social machine for the Heart Manual service, in which requirements were elicited through various participatory design methods and a proof of concept evaluation was carried out with a prototype. The prototype was received largely positively and scored highly on the System Usability Scale, indicating the success of the proposed methodology.