Building Human-Centered Systems

Within the current socio-economic paradigm, in which engineering systems are key for the sustainable development (Moses, 2003), the region is considered the place of untraded interdependencies, meaning “…conventions, informal rules, and habitats that coordinate economic actors under conditions of uncertainty. These assets are a central form of scarcity in contemporary capitalism, and hence a central form of geographical differentiation” (Storper, 1998) and economic growth. The actors include “firms, organizations and institutions [that] interact in the generation, diffusion and use of new—and economically useful—knowledge in the production process” (Fischer, Diez, & Snickars, 2001). Some of these interactions are based on information and communication technologies (ICT) in terms of digitally-enabled knowledge networks, which have been developed through ill-defined communities of practice (CoPs).