90. Participatory Design in Sustainability Projects
Edward Prutzer, Virginia Tech; Maaz Gardezi, Virginia Tech
Posted: February 28, 2022 Accepted Languages: English/Inglés/Inglês
In roughly the past decade, various approaches have emerged in anticipatory governance that more fully embroil members of the public into sociotechnical assemblages to co-create and enact more equitable technological futures. These include, though are not limited to, co-design, living labs, and responsible innovation. Such approaches show promise in exploring intersections of social-cyber-environmental systems, focusing on collectives composed of different actor categories, institutions, emergent digital technologies, and ecosystems. Yet STS perspectives have also qualified such approaches for not fully conceptualizing how to foster inclusion in ways that respect different local contexts and understandings of responsibility in research on innovation, the role of the nonhuman in such assemblages, and the role conflict can play in producing (rather than prohibiting) genuinely powerful insights on standing technological systems. This panel aims to gather research, conceptual frameworks, and advanced reviews in these areas to provide insights on how to enact such approaches in grounded research. We believe such work can both cement situated understandings of responsibility and innovation at a local scale while providing insights on how to design research employing co-design, living labs, and responsible innovation frameworks. Our panel has particular interest in sustainable futures and interventions. Though we welcome research projects with different technologies and sectors at focus, suggestions include papers that focus on different actors and systems in AI development and implementation, agriculture, biotechnology, fuel transitions, geoengineering, nanotechnology, speculative design, technology assessment, transportation, and/or urban planning.
