Michael Arnold Mages
Northeastern University
Viewed from a systemic perspective, social services hold complex and rich profiles. From a tactical perspective, services play an important role in addressing community needs. However, services also play an important role in fostering community infrastructure and advancing the advocacy mission of an organization. This paper presents the cases of three related projects to develop interactive services for a key social service organization to address specific challenges faced by parents, guardians, and caregivers of pre-K children in East Boston. Rather than discussing these cases solely from the perspective of how they might meet the needs of residents, these cases will be further analyzed from the systemic perspective of these projects as tools for both infrastructure and advocacy.
KEYWORDS: systemic design, infrastructure, community design, midlevel organization, socio-technical systems, advocacy, early childhood education, social good
