The Sociotechnical Digital Twin: On the Gap Between Social and Technical Feasibility

The last five years has seen an exponential increase in interest around the notion of a digital twin. Multiple systematic reviews have established a base set of findings which are now broadly taken as assumptions in the field. The findings have outlined frameworks, integration patterns, distinctions between product and process oriented digital twins, simulation and the leveraging of artificial intelligence to support prediction and optimisation. As the use cases of digital twins have evolved from a predominance in manufacturing and into the sociotechnical domain to support the social world, a gap emerges between the social requirements and the technical machinery of digital twins. This gap is significant and worthy of exploration as it presents important challenges for digital twin research including use of sociotechnical design methods, problems arising from a so-called abstraction gap and various epistemological concerns. This paper proposes an analytical route to ameliorating the sociotechnical gap which is discussed within a future notion of an Environment Digital Twin.