Social Sciences & Humanities
Social research allows us to tackle different societal challenges – for example, ageing societies or radicalisation,– and informs us to design approaches and technical solutions to address them. Therefore, the team of MINDS & SPARKS includes expertise from different social-scientific disciplines (e.gl, sociology, communication science, political science, …) and their respective theoretical backgrounds and perspectives. This allows us to address topics such as ageing and care, participation and migration, education, open science, radicalisation, and others. Furthermore, it allows us to apply social-scientific methodologies for different areas of application, from literature reviews to requirements analyses.
Especially when it comes to the development of novel information and communication technologies (ICT), social sciences are crucial to understand the societal challenges to be solved with a technical application. Furthermore, social scientific methodology is applied in user requirements analysis and human computer interaction (HCI), thus enabling the development of technical solutions that are tailored to the users’ needs. This ensures the uptake of the solutions, as well as user satisfaction. M&S has vast experience in carrying out requirements analyses, use-case design, end-user testing and piloting.