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Into Blue Skies—a Transdisciplinary Foresight and Co-creation Method for Adding Robustness to Visioneering

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Abstract

Expectations play a distinctive role in shaping emerging technologies and producing hype cycles when a technology is adopted or fails on the market. To harness expectations, facilitate and provoke forward-looking discussions, and identify policy alternatives, futures studies are required. Here, expert anticipation of possible or probable future developments becomes extremely arbitrary beyond short-term prediction, and the results of futures studies are often controversial, divergent, or even contradictory; thus they are contested. Nevertheless, such socio-technical imaginaries may prescribe a future that seems attainable to those involved in the visioneering process, and other futures may thus become less likely and shaping them could become more difficult. This implies a need to broaden the debate on socio-technological development, creating spaces where policy, science, and society can become mutually responsive to each other. Laypeople’s experiential and value-based knowledge is highly relevant for complementing expertise to inform socially robust decision-making in science and technology. This paper presents the evolution of a transdisciplinary, forward-looking co-creation process—a demand-side approach developed to strengthen needs-driven research and innovation governance by cross-linking knowledge of laypeople, experts, and stakeholders. Three case studies serve as examples. We argue that this approach can be considered a method for adding social robustness to visioneering and to responsible socio-technical change.

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Notes

  1. As a policy concept, RRI aims at aligning research and innovation with the values, needs and expectations of society; public engagement being one of the concepts’ major elements. This is implemented as a crosscutting theme throughout Horizon 2020.

  2. CIMULACT—Citizen and Multi-actor engagement on Horizon2020, 2015–2017, www.cimulact.eu.

    CASI—Public Participation in Developing a Common Framework for Assessment and Management of Sustainable Innovation, 2014–2017, www.casi2020.eu.

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  1. Institute of Technology Assessment, Austrian Academy of Sciences, Strohgasse 45/5, 1030, Vienna, Austria

    Niklas Gudowsky & Mahshid Sotoudeh

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  1. Niklas Gudowsky
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Gudowsky, N., Sotoudeh, M. Into Blue Skies—a Transdisciplinary Foresight and Co-creation Method for Adding Robustness to Visioneering. Nanoethics 11, 93–106 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11569-017-0284-7

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