To the general public, the technoscientific laboratory is a mysterious place. From it can flow knowledge about the existence of arcane entities, like the Higgs boson, or recipes for life-saving products, such as cures for cancer. To scientists and engineers, it represents endless possibilities for transformative research, discovery, and progress that have the power to enlighten and shape our collective futures. For politicians and the public, it often appears – as the stronghold of science – to be equally a source of elitist self-interest, always asking for more money, and democratic disruption, demanding that its principles be taught in schools and that economic activities be constrained by its predictions even when they conflict with popular beliefs and consumer preferences. The laboratory has a unique capacity to unite and divide.
In the public sphere, the laboratory is subject to a confederacy of descriptors: veiled, inaccessible, other-worldly, threatening, anti-religious, fascinating, god-like, awe-inspiring, progress-driving, and potentially life-saving. New efforts to deal with technoscience and its problematic social contexts by means of methodologies for civil cooperation in the lab itself are explored in Early Engagement and New Technologies: Opening up the Laboratory. Twelve contributions by 20 authors from 6 countries analyze and critically reflect on five innovative approaches to early engagement: constructive technology assessment (CTA), value-sensitive design (VSD), midstream modulation (MM), the network approach for moral evaluation (NAME), and political technology assessment (PTA). The core of the book simply presents the five methodologies by scholars who have been among their leading developers and practitioners.
Arie Rip and Douglas K. R. Robinson introduce CTA, and in doing so illustrate its potential for enhancing the research space in a burgeoning scientific field like nanoscience. The resultant nanotechnologies inspire widespread optimism about their inherent promise, but also elicit significant trepidation from stakeholders concerned about unintended consequences and possible negative impacts. CTA involves the insertion of a social scientist or other analyst into the R&D environment, and it incorporates wide-ranging opportunities for collaboration, critical assessment, and analysis. The protected space that has been the nanoscience lab evolves into a space for learning and collaboration that embraces cross-disciplinary consideration of implications and trajectories of nanotechnology developments. The result is a more reflexive laboratory that becomes sensitive to, and anticipatory of, societal implications and adaptability issues. Nanoscientists and social scientists take on collective responsibility for lab outputs.
In the end, technological outputs are developed for people. With this in mind, Batya Friedman, Peter H. Kahn Jr., and Alan Borning explore VSD, which seeks to account for human values throughout the technology development process, emphasizing the need to be both principled and comprehensive in the consideration and inclusion of a broad spectrum of common human values. The authors identify a number of values that have the potential to influence technological design, including human welfare, ownership and property, privacy, freedom from bias, trust, informed consent, environmental sustainability, and others. VSD benefits from the incorporation of multiple empirical methods as well as the consideration of both direct and indirect stakeholders of technology outputs. This form of early engagement seeks to create user-readiness in its products. Reflecting such goals, the authors also provide practical suggestions and heuristics so that practitioners can develop comprehensive VSD programs for their own environments.
A third early engagement methodology, MM, is introduced by Erik Fisher and Daan Schuurbiers. MM involves the introduction of reflexive, material perturbations to conditions under which innovation professionals consider the social and ethical contexts of their research. Further, MM is an enhancement of socio-technical integration research, a methodology that has been employed in a wide range of laboratory, industrial, and professional settings to study external expectations on innovation research, elucidate feedback on the relative responsiveness of innovation professional to society, and investigate possible enhancements from collaboration between researchers and social scientists. MM relates gradual and incremental changes in research and technological innovation to changes in contextual awareness. Testing the capacity of scientists to be and remain socially responsive in the laboratory setting is arguably the key benefit of MM. Implications abound with respect to the potential that MM has in encouraging societal consideration in technology development and introduction.
Research and development trajectories are described by Ibo van de Poel and Neelke Doorn as having capacities to shape the ultimate consequences of technological development. In light of societal experience, these final consequences appear largely unpredictable and unknown to most well-meaning researchers in the lab. To address this issue, the authors introduce a NAME. This methodology investigates moral issues associated with specific R&D initiatives in a three-part process. First, moral issues are identified by ethicists and social scientists. Second, the identified issues are reflected on and assessed. Finally, researchers engage with scientists to distribute responsibilities for responding to ethical issues. While research suggests that NAME has merits that are similar to the other methodologies explored in this Early Engagement volume, it is unique in its capacity to identify real-world moral issues, as well as to consider the plurality of beliefs and values relative to morality.
The fifth and final early engagement methodology described here is PTA as presented by Rinie van Est. Politicians and policy-makers stand to benefit from PTA; the quality of communication is key in the relative success of a laboratory's engagement with the political process. PTA seeks to build a productive relationship with policy-makers by informing and ultimately contributing to constructive political debate. Fostering an atmosphere of collegial trust and two-way dialog improves the opportunity for R&D to translate into economic growth stimulation, informed political decision-making and debate, and ultimately enhanced human welfare. Of course, TA itself has a history that extends from 1970s experiments in the USA with the creation of a congressional Office of Technology Assessment to the 1980s Dutch model of CTA, which Rip and Robinson apply to nanoscience earlier in this volume, and beyond. Chapter 2, by Armin Grunwald and Matthias Achternbosch, provides a deft, critical review of the overall TA history. Against this background, van Est introduces another form of TA into the special setting of the Rathenau Instituut in the Netherlands as an addition to the corporatist environment that has long been manifested in Dutch politics, and a means to inform democracies that have often eschewed the consistent, collaborative inclusion of scientists.
These five approaches are complemented by four critical reflections on opportunities and challenges involved, to various degrees, in each. Michael Gorman, Antonio Calleja-López, Shannon Conley, and Farzad Mahootian consider some difficulties of fostering a laboratory environment that integrates ethicists and social scientists. Arguing that whether explicitly or not, all technoscience involves ethics, the four authors argue that the concepts of trading zones and interactional expertise offer helpful ways to understand how humanists can engage with scientists so as to make ethical discussions more conscious. Jane Calvert, drawing on science, technology and society (STS) literature and three of her own experiences of interdisciplinary work in synthetic biology, analyzes difficulties in the ideal of collaborative research – difficulties that suggest a need for modesty on the part of social scientists. Of course, one challenge of the laboratory setting is the immaterial nature of anticipated (or unanticipated) outputs. Simone van der Burg again addresses some challenges that ethicists have faced in laboratory engagements by arguing that, contrary to some critics, it is reasonable to undertake ethical assessments of technologies that do not yet exist. Finally, Eleonore Pauwels incorporates concepts from previous chapters to tease out a range of cohabiting tensions between humanists and technoscientists, especially when they use different metaphors to imagine biotechnical futures.
Despite all the good material in these 10 studies, the first and last chapters in this volume – the introduction and conclusion by the four editors – are the most important and original contributions. Chapter 1 sets the stage by identifying some of the forces promoting early engagement work. Going beyond the strictly scholarly excitement of laboratory studies, in which STS work in the late 1970s and early 1980s opened the black box of the laboratory to ethnographic description, the new engagement laboratory studies aspire to intervene and “to attune research and innovation processes to societal needs”. They open up the laboratory to more than anthropology and ethnography, bringing a range of humanities and social science disciplines, from the descriptive to the normative, into laboratory life. They note as well how such engagements have emerged in response to the policy challenge of the Collingridge dilemma – that early in R&D when a trajectory is easy to change, we seldom know enough to find a point of leverage, while when later experience reveals the need for change, the vector of development has acquired so much momentum that it is difficult to alter – and to policy mandates both in the USA, such as in the 2003 creation of the 21st Century Nanotechnology Research and Development Act and associated National Nanotechnology Initiative (NNI), and in Europe, as in the European Commission's 2007 Science in Society Work Programme.
The concluding chapter further compares and contrasts the five methods of early engagement in terms of aims and impacts, types of intervention, levels and phases of R&D, and conceptions of normativity. It points out, for instance, that CTA aims to broaden design and development processes and make them more reflexive, whereas VSD seeks to embed values into design processes and products. Additionally, while the first four methods engage scientists and engineers working in the lab itself, PTA targets business and political actors outside the lab.
More importantly, the first and last chapters highlight a number of basic questions for all such methodologies:
What is the best stage of a project for early engagement between humanists, social scientists, and scientists?
What is the precise role of an embedded humanist or social scientist in a physical or biological science research project?
What is the proper balance between collaboration and criticism?
What are the specific aims of ethical reflection?
In what ways do early engagements aim to be normative?
Finally, as a modest criticism, it may be useful to note that this volume makes no mention of the program to create a science of science and innovation policy (SciSIP) that emerged in parallel with and complementary to the NNI engagement mandate. It might be useful to compare the need for scientific research on science policy, in order to facilitate more socially and politically intelligent policy decisions, with the goals of early engagement to promote greater reflexivity and sensitivity to social values in R&D activities. Could early engagement itself be enhanced by SciSIP and the use of Julia Lane's STAR METRICS? Could SciSIP or STAR METRICS benefit by incorporating some forms of early engagement?
Early Engagement and New Technologies will likely be consulted in the future as a seminal volume exploring strong interdisciplinary collaboration in the R&D process and laboratory settings. Some methodologies, such as CTA and VSD, emerge as practitioner-ready; others appear to require further research and consideration before widespread adoption and application. Nonetheless, each methodology offers potential to a broad array of stakeholders in the scientific pursuit of new technologies. The humanities and social sciences have the potential to enhance efforts by natural and life scientists to benefit the societies in which we all live as well as humanity in general – and, although this too is slighted, to benefit themselves by their engagements with R&D activities and actors. This new volume is thus an important addition to the “Philosophy of Engineering and Technology” series edited by Pieter Vermaas of the Delft University of Technology. At the same time, the publisher Springer should be encouraged to invest a little more in the production process; the volume could have used a bit more copy editing and is weakened by the lack of an index.