Understanding the Impact of Digital Technology: a Case Study in Rural Areas [Supplementary Material]

This package contains supplementary material associated to the paper "Understanding the Impact of Digital Technology: a Case Study in Rural Areas". 

Abstract: Designing systems that account for sustainability concerns demands for a better understanding of the impact that digital technology interventions can have on a certain socio-technical context. However, limited studies are available about the elicitation of impact-related information from stakeholders. This paper reports the experience of the authors in identifying the impact of digitalisation in remote mountain areas, in the context of a system for ordinary land management and hydro-geological risk control. Based on a set of interviews and a workshop, we reconstructed the current socio-technical system.  Furthermore, we elicited information about the impact of digital technologies that were introduced in the specific context in recent years (GIS software, instant messaging apps, sensors, drones, etc.). Positive impacts are mostly economic and organisational. Negative ones are higher stress due to the excess of connectivity, and partial reduction of decision-making abilities. Our study contributes to the literature with a set of impacts specific to the case, and a list of lessons learned from the experience.

The package contains the following files:

1. Socio-technical System.pdf: a graphical representation of the socio-technical system that has been reconstructed by the authors of the paper.

2. Description of System Entities.pdf: detailed description of the entities represented in the socio-technical system.

3. Incremental Data Analysis.pdf: graphs depicted during data analysis, to represent relations between entities, towards the representation of the socio-technical system. 

4. Impacts and quotes - selected examples (EN).pdf: sample quotes (translated from Italian) associated to the impacts identified.