The ‘smart city’ vision is popular, but it lacks citizen perspectives. The aim of this study was to gain insight into whether and how art-based citizen engagement can create more room for citizen perspectives in smart cities by developing and testing an art-based citizen engagement project in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. To that end, a combination of interactive theatre, interaction design and social research methods was used to bring together diverse publics and innovation professionals for joint exploration of increased dataveillance in cities. The events were studied through observations, and through interviews with participants and organisers. Data analysis was guided by the outcomes, processes and challenges of the responsible innovation dimensions: inclusion, reflexivity, anticipation and responsiveness (Stilgoe et al., 2013). The most important achievements of art-based citizen engagement were: engaging people who would not have engaged with the topic otherwise, encouraging participants to question common phrases and assumptions, exploring future social implications of technologies, and staging meaningful interactions between citizens and professionals. The most significant challenge was to involve citizens in a way that could influence innovation trajectories.@en

Since the smart city vision increasingly shapes our urban life globally, it becomes ever more urgent to integrate participatory futuring in ongoing smart city-related technology development. This study aimed to find starting points for such integration by unraveling the ‘guiding visions’ of corporate technological innovators in the smart mobility and transport sector around Amsterdam. We conducted and analyzed interviews with innovators from 12 smart city start-ups and scale-ups based on three elements of guiding visions: (1) the desired future city, (2) the purposes of technologies they expect to fulfill, and (3) how technologies are thought to relate to their wider societal context. The interviewed innovators appeared to envision a clean, frictionless future city, whereby smart city technologies fulfilled four purposes: catalyzing efficiency, nudging citizens, customizing user experiences, and connecting places and people. Innovators’ ambitions for societal participation were modest and mainly aimed at end-users to optimize design features. Overall, the innovators’ guiding visions highlight the need for participatory futuring approaches that appeal to innovators’ motivation to make a social contribution, but also help them to widen and deepen their understanding of the public values that citizens perceive to be at stake in the smart city.@en

Art is increasingly used to engage publics on emerging and controversial technologies, but we still know little about what works in art-based engagement and why. To investigate what art can do for public engagement, we systematically reviewed academic work published from 2000 to 2018 about the effect of art on organized public engagement. We used the dimensions of Responsible Research and Innovation as an analytical framework to identify what outcomes are achieved and what processes contribute to those outcomes. The 30 included studies showed that art mainly supported engagement by (1) reaching wider audiences, (2) fueling individual reflection, and (3) making visible how technologies come into being and interact with the world. With due consideration of the risks of instrumentalization, future research should empirically and reflexively investigate the outcomes and methodologies of art-based engagement, especially concerning collective reflection and change.@en

As partners in a European project for responsible research and innovation (RRI) in synthetic biology, we organized a collaborative and interactive process of real-time technology assessment. This process consisted of two related activities complementing each other as different modes of future making, one focussing on technological options, the other on societal objectives. For the first type of activity, we established a three-year collaboration with the annual international Genetically Engineered Machines competition, stimulating student teams to consider the wider societal ramifications of future options for innovation in synthetic biology. As a follow-up activity in this process of real-time and anticipatory technology assessment, we involved a variety of societal stakeholders and researchers in synthetic biology in workshop dialogues focusing on antibiotic resistance and renewable energy as societal challenges. We invited the participants to critically consider the nature of these challenges and related value-laden issues of concern, and to define in this context opportunities and needs for innovation in synthetic biology. We see both approaches as vital in fulfilling the ambitions of responsible research and innovation. In terms of the governance of innovation, we emphasize the need for a proper toolbox and a co-creation infrastructure as crucial requirements for inclusive, reflexive and responsive practices of future making.

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To stimulate research and innovation (R&I), to contribute to the solution of societal challenges and to align R&I with societal values, the European Commission has launched the governance framework of Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI). RRI figures in many high-level EU policies as a means to promote smart growth, and a growing community of R&I practitioners from both the public and private sectors appears committed to it. Although debates on what RRI precisely entails have not reached closure yet, RRI provides an interesting avenue to explore ways of making R&I more societally germane. While recognizing the usefulness of keeping critical reflection on RRI’s meaning alive, we suggest that to make the step from theorizing to implementation, RRI could benefit from a clearer conceptualization. This chapter presents the iterative trajectory in conceptualizing RRI followed as part of RRI Tools, one of a number of EC-funded research projects and support acts aimed at fleshing out what RRI can and should be, and the conceptualization of RRI that this led to. It suggests that RRI is best captured if in R&I governance attention is paid to the five p’s of Purpose, Products, Processes, Preconditions and People, and that further elaborations on the meaning of RRI should happen in dialogue with attempts at practicing RRI.@en

In this one-day learning workshop, we explore how embodied speculation in participatory design and innovation can help stakeholders imagine, critically reflect and engage in dialogue about the social opportunities and ethical implications of emerging technologies. The workshop starts with a round table discussion about relevant criteria when conducting embodied speculations. We then engage in embodied speculation ourselves, focusing on identifying the social opportunities and ethical implications of Quantified Self technologies for the year 2026. We end the workshop by reflecting on our experiences with these embodied speculations to foster knowledge exchange and learning. We reach out to participants with different professional backgrounds in the fields of design and innovation that would like to learn about embodied speculative techniques and who would like to explore the research opportunities this opens up.@en