This panel focuses on issues of designing information systems to both account for, and better support, the increasingly social functions that computer-based tech nologies play. The goal of this panel is to serve as a forum to advance and discuss initial principles for what we are calling the social design of information systems. By social design we mean to emphasize that the presence and uses of information systems play an often significant role in supporting the reshaping social relations, social structures, social boundaries, and social norms. Many such aspects of this reshaping are highlighted in the scholarship of IFIP 8.2 members, and with this panel we seek to focus the collective attention of the assembled scholars to shift attention from (problematizing( the issues with designing information systems toward advancing socially relevant design principles (e.g., Iivari et al. 1998).