Entangled futures and responsibilities in technology assessment

Drawing upon decades of thought, critique, and learning about the social shaping of science and technology, responsible innovation (RI) benefits from numerous scholarly and policy precedents. Perhaps none is more longstanding and widely institutionalized than technology assessment (TA). This special issue – the first for the Journal of Responsible Innovation – explores the relationship between TA and RI, engaging some of their more promising synergies, significant differences, and pressing tensions.

If TA studies and evaluates new and emerging science and technology, RI develops principles and practices to guide their socially responsible pursuit. The two are thereby linked to the same fundamental endeavor and face similar challenges, even if their explicit commitments and intervention philosophies may vary. Both arguably began their public policy careers in the US – with authorizations for the Office of Technology Assessment in 1972 and for the ‘responsible development’ of nanotechnology in 2003 – and subsequently became more fully articulated and established in Europe. The recent European-wide institutionalization of Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) intensifies questions about anticipation, normative reflection, and divisions of labor in the products and processes of TA, and how TA actors and analysts should navigate the shifting policy landscape.

Guest editors Ulrike Bechtold, Daniela Fuchs, and Niklas Gudowsky skillfully channel the discussions and debates around these questions with the two-fold theme of futures and responsibilities in TA. These two (interrelated) lines of inquiry weave throughout the seven research articles, four discussion pieces, and collection of perspective, pedagogy, review, and editorial offerings that round out this special issue. Each contribution takes up the role of imagined futures in TA – from visions and prototypes to myths and utopias – and relates these to questions of responsibility, responsiveness, or responsibilization. Accordingly, contributors variously focus on the uptake (Grunwald 2017), transfer (Torgersen and Fuchs 2017), and democratization (Van Est 2017; contra Nentwich 2017) of anticipatory knowledge in TA, asking how future imaginaries assign (Grunwald 2017), distribute (Lösch, Heil, and Schneider 2017), and redistribute (Dickel and Schrape 2017) meanings and responsibilities.

Thus, treating the use of future imaginaries around Smart Cities, Fab Labs, and Big Data as forms of ‘socio-epistemic practice,’ Lösch, Heil, and Schneider (2017) show how this move can reveal the ‘making and contesting’ of present and future responsibilities and serve as a resource for normative assessment. Others take up the entanglement of futures and responsibilities as itself an object of ethical (Grunwald 2017), historical (Zimmer-Merkle and Fleischer 2017), and hermeneutical (Dickel and Schrape 2017) inquiry; stakeholder engagement (Decker et al. 2017); and laboratory negotiations (Schulz-Schaeffer and Meister 2017). And in a lively discussion section, Nentwich (2017), Van Est (2017), and Delvenne (2017) each take issue with Van Lente, Swierstra, and Joly’s (2017) provocation that RRI demands ‘a re-appreciation of ethical deliberation’ and an acknowledgement of ‘the ambiguous consultation of stakeholders’ in TA.

As this brief editorial introduction makes plain, and as Bechtold, Fuchs, and Gudowsky’s (2017) guest editorial introduction demonstrates, seasoned TA practitioners and newcomers to the idea alike will find in the following pages a compelling and extensive treatment of the politics and practices of taking technologies, futures, and responsibilities more explicitly into account in established forms of TA and with a view towards capacity building for RI.