Public participation in mission-oriented innovation projects

Mission-oriented innovation policy is currently gaining renewed interest as an approach for addressing societal challenges. One of the promises is that missions can mobilise and align diverse stakeholders around a shared goal. Recent literature underlines the importance of public participation (e.g. municipalities and civil society organisations...

Adapting to changing values: a framework for responsible decision-making in smart city development

Smart cities are proposed as a solution for problems of urbanization. Technologies associated with smart cities involve the monitoring of human activities and resulting data streams. These technologies affect certain public values, which may be subject to change depending on their sociotechnical development. This paper presents a method that...

OSiD: opening the conceptual design of biobased processes to a context-sensitive sustainability analysis

Biobased production has been promoted as an alternative to fossil-based production to mitigate climate change. However, emerging concerns over the sustainability of biobased products have shown that tensions can emerge between different objectives and concerns, like emission reduction targets and food security, and that these are dependent on...

Wa/ondering with data - or, Responsibly measuring socio-technical serendipity in the urban environment

Current trends in serendipity research and collaborative ethics point to the importance of cultivating bottom-up approaches to designing for datafication in urban centers. The focus on pattern recognition in big scale data analysis, combined with an exponential growth in and infrastructural support of ubiquitous information and communication...

The future of value sensitive design

Emotions, values and technology: illuminating the blind spots

Responsible innovation and ethics of technology increasingly take emotions into consideration. Yet, there are still some crucial aspects of emotions that have not been addressed in the literature. In order to close this gap, we introduce these neglected aspects and discusses their theoretical and practical implications. We will zoom in on the...

Passion for the Art of Morally Responsible Technology Development

In this article, we discuss the importance of emotions for ethical reflection on technological developments, as well as the role that art can play in this. We review literature that argues that emotions can and should play an important role in the assessment and acceptance of technological risk and in designing morally responsible technologies....

Responsible innovation during front-end development: increasing intervention capacities for enhancing project management reflections on complexity

Responsible innovation requires, among other things, that innovators reflect on the broader socio-ethical and socio-economic context of their work. This may be done by reflecting on innovation project complexity. However, tools and methods enabling relevant reflection are not abundant. In this explorative study, we investigated the effect of...

Crowd-based innovaties: verschuivende verantwoordelijkheden in een institutional void

The crowd increasingly plays a key role in facilitating innovations in a variety of sectors, spurred on by IT developments and the concomitant increase in connectivity. Initiatives in this direction, captured under the umbrella term ‘crowd-based innovations’, offer novel opportunities in socio-technical systems by increasing the access, reach...

Responsible Innovation in light of Levinas: rethinking the relation between responsibility and innovation

To date, much of the work on Responsible Innovation (RI) has focused on the ‘responsible’ part of RI. This has left the ‘innovation’ part in need of conceptual innovation of its own. If such conceptual innovation is to contribute to a coherent conception of RI, however, it is crucial to better understand the relation between responsibility and...

Contested Technologies and Design for Values: The Case of Shale Gas

The introduction of new energy technologies may lead to public resistance and contestation. It is often argued that this phenomenon is caused by an inadequate inclusion of relevant public values in the design of technology. In this paper we examine the applicability of the value sensitive design (VSD) approach. While VSD was primarily introduced...

Cities in sustainability innovation and transition

Transitions towards higher levels of sustainability have been subject of many investigations, both theoretically and empirically. While the focus has been on the scale of national innovation systems and technology systems, the quality of space (place) with regard to regions and cities has received scarce attention or no attention at all, thereby...

Stakeholder values and platform wars: smart meters in the Netherlands

The interconnected nature of the different components of smart grids is a prime example of complexity in technological systems. Developing such systems is highly dependent on the wishes and needs of end-users and other stakeholders. We argue that stakeholder values should be taken into consideration during the design and standardisation of...