Laboratory settings as built anticipations – prototype scenarios as negotiation arenas between the present and imagined futures

ABSTRACT

As opposed to the recent tendency in Responsible Research and Innovation and in some approaches of Technology Assessment (like Vision Assessment) to reduce the role of socio-technical visions and scenarios to their impact on present debates, our contribution argues that a specific type of future concepts – situational scenarios, and especially their manifestation as prototype scenarios – should be conceptualised as hybrid realities and as negotiation arenas between the present and imagined futures. Based on empirical evidence from the field of ubiquitous computing we apply this concept for analysing three major functions and uses of situational scenarios in the process of technology development: specification, evaluation, and demonstration. We argue that recalibrating the relation between the present and imagined futures is an important aspect of all these functions and uses of situational scenarios, especially when they occur as prototype scenarios.

KEYWORDS:

• Socio-technical futures
• scenarios
• prototypes
• situational scenarios
• prototype scenarios

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Ingo Schulz-Schaeffer is a full professor for sociology of technology and innovation at the Technical University of Berlin. His recent research in the field of science and technology studies includes: the role of future concepts in technology development, practices and technologies of cooperation in transnational projects of software development, crowdfunding as gift exchange, and locative media.

Martin Meister is a research associate at the Technical University of Berlin. His main research interests are the sociology of technology and science and technology studies, and more generally sociological theory. Actual empirical focus is on Ubiquitous Computing and Robotics.

Notes

1. Likewise, ‘anticipatory governance’ (Guston 2014) is portrayed as ‘opening’ present discourses and societal negotiations.

2. Whether the scenarios found in the empirical material are but fashionable illustrations or in fact influence the course of development cannot be seen by looking at these scenarios only. These questions can only be decided on the basis of a thorough reconstruction of the long-term development activities of the respective project team.

3. The driving force behind the application-oriented and technology-oriented guidance of situational scenarios is quite similar to the one that keeps the ‘promise-requirement spiral’ of van Lente and Rip (1998, 223) in motion.

4. A ‘false positive’ is a false alarm. The engineers had to learn, from extensive talk with professionals from the sector of elderly care, that missing one critical fall event is not the most challenging problem. The real problem is: No one would use a system that alerts rescue or relatives several times every day without a serious cause. So here the engineers learned from talking about present problems and practices about the basic requirements of their future system.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft [grant number SCHU 1384/4-1].