Responsible innovation: ethics, safety and technology, some personal thoughts on the MOOC

ABSTRACT

I recently completed the Delft University of Technology Responsible Innovation: Ethics Safety and technology MOOC. The course involved a series of video lectures with associated readings, submissions and a peer review process. In this review I would like to offer an overview of the materials and topics and a few thoughts on the experience.

KEYWORDS:

• MOOC delft design engineering

The following reflections are born from my having completed the ‘Responsible Innovation: Ethics Safety and technology’ Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) offered by Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands. This review offers an overview of the materials and topics of the course as well as a few thoughts on the experience of following it.

Although I have been working in a non-academic role in the field of Responsible Innovation for over a decade for the Bassetti Foundation in Milan,¹ I recently embarked on a PhD within the field of Responsible Innovation. As such, and given that I am currently based in the Netherlands, I decided to register for the course in order to gain a better understanding of how the Responsible Innovation (RI) concept was treated within Dutch academia and so as to include this in a European Perspectives chapter in my thesis.

The creation of the MOOC is also interesting from a further perspective, however, raising the question of which possibilities and openings this form of online intervention could offer for RI engagement within academia, given its open, free and (possibly) inclusive nature.

Course structure

The course ran over a period of seven weeks, with a different topic area covered each week. Each topic was addressed through a series of video lectures, with readings available to download, a quiz to complete, and various extras for the diligent student.

In addition to the typical registration formalities and introductions to fellow students, the first week included a world map showing where the course participants lived. Interestingly, approximately 1100 people were represented on the map, with 315 of those spread across the Americas, 279 across Asia (predominantly in the South and South East), 374 in Europe, and 24 across Africa.

The introductory week was followed by a series of participant polls, mainly addressing issues surrounding risk, safety, and public involvement in decision-making processes. Participants then viewed the first web lecture, an introduction to the concept of RI delivered by Professor Jeroen van den Hoven.

In his lecture, van den Hoven argues that technology is always value laden, that responsible innovations have to have the aim of solving the (EU policy driven) ‘Grand Challenges’, and that they themselves also have to be expressions of our (European) shared moral values.

He argued that RI involves both substantive and process aspects. The substantive addresses problems in order to improve current situations, reflecting the Grand Challenges notion as proposed by the European Commission (EC 2012). The process aspect includes a discussion of the criteria for responsibility, reflecting much of the literature present in this journal and earlier publications related to innovation processes (see Owen, Bessant, and Heintz 2013 for examples).

Van den Hoven offers a broad definition of RI, suggesting that technical improvement can be defined as responsible innovation if it addresses some of the moral and practical problems that exist within current technology. This seems to be a step away from the conceptions that I have come across in my working life, which tend to address innovation processes themselves within broad technological fields, aiming in some way to steer such processes rather than to address the issue of incremental improvement of existing technologies.

This broadly drawn definition in fact lies at the base of the MOOC content as it develops into a practical framework for attempting such developments. It adopts the European Commission Grand Challenges narrative and related keys of RI (EC 2012) in its broadest form,² while seeming to push the idea towards a possible applied framework, constituting an interesting and challenging proposal.

The approach generally takes an engineering design perspective, with the classic ‘trolley problem’ used to make the argument that engineers can avoid dramatic decision-making quandaries that emerge during technological system building (as in deciding between competing disastrous consequences) through design. The ground is thereby laid for a discussion about individual and collective responsibility and the related ‘many hands’ problem.

The course then turns to the dilemma of moral overload (van den Hoven, Lokhorst, and Van de Poel 2012), with an explanation of the difficulties engineers face of fulfilling a series of differing and competing moral obligations. Emotions, values, and decision-making scenarios are brought into the discussion, aiming to show where (on a series of graphs) an acceptable solution (in RI terms) might sit in terms of its moral obligations.

According to one graph, there are optimum places to situate any proposed solutions that are deemed acceptable, because they come closest to fulfilling as many of the moral obligations as possible. This seems to form a basis for the Value Sensitive Design model that is developed in the rest of the course (van den Hoven and Manders Huits 2009).

My understanding of this model is that, while no proposed solution or development can please everybody or fulfil all criteria of moral expectation, it can nevertheless be engineered to fulfil as many as possible. Thus, the closer a given project comes to fulfilling all identified criteria, as determined by mapping the project on a certain field within the graph that is deemed acceptable, the more responsible it is deemed to be.

The course also notes the importance of the institutional context within which a technology is being developed and implemented. This context points to the relevance of how the public is involved and treated during the planning and development process, and how this in turn affects the outcomes of possibly contentious engineering projects moving forward, although without entering into a discussion of the ethical issues involved in public participation (e.g. Blok 2014).

The course goes on to address several issues that I have not seen addressed in an in-depth manner in the broader body of RI scholarship. For instance, in balancing risk, safety, and cost, the course moves into quantitative methodologies and mathematical modelling. It also incorporates innovation management and the economic determinants of innovation, before closing with a series of lectures related to designing for values and trust, and presence in design (the underlying steering of the design process towards wellbeing). These final lectures very much represent the culmination of the scholarly debate on RI so far, in my view.

Each week involved a multiple-choice quiz, and there were two 500-word essays to submit over the seven-week period. The essays were peer reviewed, with each participant expected to mark at least four other submissions. Guidelines for submissions and marking were well explained, and I chose to mark more than four to get a better idea of the other participants’ views and capacities. The level and quality of submissions varied enormously: Some were well-structured and well-argued, but many were merely personal opinions on single problems and could not in any way be described as academic. Several consisted of single-phrase answers.

Participants then had to self-review their work based upon their peer responses, with a final mark and possible certificate available for successful students.

The experience

Overall, I found the course to be well run. There were a few glitches and some potentially unclear essay instructions, but there were no major issues with the organization or the platform.

In terms of content, I feel that the organizers should be praised for having created such a course in such a rapidly developing field, although I also feel that there were some omissions from the scholarly literature, with the concept of RI rather stripped of some of its richness. Stilgoe, Owen and Macnaghten’s article and definition were cited (Stilgoe, Owen, and MacNaghten 2013), Fisher’s midstream modulation of technology work was noted (Fisher, Mahajan, and Mitcham 2006), as was Rene von Schomberg’s contributions (Von Schomberg 2013); beyond this, however, references to wider RI literature were lacking.

In particular, the discussion surrounding public participation was not given the prominence that it enjoys within the wider RI debate (see Guston 2015 for further discussion). There was in this respect a missed opportunity in relation to the broader scholarship on RI in general. Articles from this journal were not cited during the course; and arguments surrounding the question of who may benefit from innovation (or not), the ethics of public participation in engineering projects, the possible implications of the use of the various pillars and objectives for RI, and in particular arguments about justice and gender were brushed over in order to direct the concept towards engineering ability at risk prevention and mitigation.

That said, the course primarily aims at making a workable and applicable model of RI that can be put into practice today by engineers and other technical experts, and the organizers should be lauded for embarking upon such a difficult task. Any MOOC must face the problem of aiming to address a broad student base with a diversity of understanding and background skills (the mathematical models were beyond me), with course designers presumably working under pressure to produce without full financial support and within available resources.

Regarding the question of the MOOC system as a possible tool for RI engagement, I would say (based solely upon this experience) that several of the student essays that I reviewed during the course showed that the experience had certainly provoked some thought in a section of the student population. The advantage of such a course is that participants come from diverse backgrounds, and as a result address the problem of RI from within their own experiences, which are interesting to read. The essays I marked were produced by people working across the technical spectrum, and I believe some seeds of design thinking in RI may have been sewn. One pressing question is how TU Delft, the European Commission, and the broader RI community can and should follow-up on and nourish such seeds.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Jonathan Hankins is Foreign Scientific Correspondent for the Bassetti Foundation in Milan. He has recently completed a PhD in the Sociology of Working Practices, with Responsible Innovation the focus of his research.

ORCID

Jonathan Hankins http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8084-7524

Notes

1. See the Foundation website for details of their work http://www.fondazionebassetti.org/en/.

2. For a detailed account of the development of the keys through the various research frameworks see de Saille in an earlier volume of this journal (de Saille 2015).