Responsible Futuring - Foundation

BACKGROUND RESPONSIBLE FUTURING

INTRODUCTION

At DesignLab, our ambition is to bridge the gaps between society and science and open up new avenues to tackle societal challenges. The goal is to generate responsible change for a future worth living.

DesignLab is developing an approach, Responsible Futuring, that builds upon the designerly tradition of design thinking and combines trans-disciplinary practices, responsible design and social involvement for societal impact. The approach strives to enable creative collaboration and knowledge flow between engineers, social scientists, policy makers, and citizens. It values stakeholder’s expertise, yet it stimulates stakeholders to go beyond disciplinary domains to be agents of societal change.

Since the start of Covid-19, we have experienced how societal challenges are complex and interconnected. The worldwide population is facing a pandemic that brought about many challenges: healthcare, education, welfare, communication, and digitalisation challenges. Today’s challenges are more complex than ever because they are part of complex societal, technological, and environmental systems. Challenges are interrelated: tackling one today might raise issues tomorrow. Solutions that work in a context, might break into another. And this does not only apply to the Covid-19 crisis. Many other challenges plague our society. How to deal with our complex world, then?

Complexity is also related to the intricate network of implications, responsibilities, and impacts. Societal challenges have an impact on many people in society. Many people have a stake, but often do not have a say in the solutions. Collaboration between experts, policymakers, and citizens has never been so needed and yet so hard to arrange.

Let’s take the Covid-19 crisis as an example. The emergency of the situation called for emergency measures based on expert scientific knowledge. However, the complexity of the short and long-term socio-technical implications calls for broader disciplinary and societal involvement in the definition of measures.

The prime minister of the Netherlands and the WHO called for co-designing with younger and older generations to bridge the generational divide. Experts in the Netherlands and Europe have advocated to include experts beyond medical science to the discussion table. A fruitful dialogue is still hard to establish. How to involve all the relevant stakeholders to the table? How to enable their collaboration?

A possible way is to involve academics and citizens to join forces, as in the development of the Covid-19 app of the Netherlands, the Corona Melder.

In that case, stakeholders carried out in a collaborative way an ethical assessment, contributing to co-create the app, taking into account multiple perspectives.

WHAT THE EXPERIENCE TELLS US

In a complex world being an innovator, a trailblazer, a visionary is not enough. Working in isolation is not enough. Working from one perspective, one discipline, one point of view is not enough. We need to find new ways to collaborate and make sense of the complex world we live in. Joining forces help complement each other such as the ethical evaluation of the Corona Melder app.

• Academics systematically study the world as is and design how the world could be. They are a driver of knowledge.

• The industry is the fuel of the economy wherein innovation happens, where solutions are produced and deployed in society.

• Governments know how to drive policymaking.

• Civic Society is the beating heart of our society, which retains practical knowledge about everyday life

Arguably, you cannot innovate without a combination of the above. Each of this expertise matter and they should be combined to deal with our complex society. However, we lack effective frameworks to do so: the ones available appear to fall short. In addition, we must take into account that tackling a challenge takes enormous social and moral efforts.

Whatever solution we come up with, a technology, a product, or a service, the solution shapes us: it changes the way we interact and the way we live. It influences our norms and values in multiple and often unforeseen ways. It shapes human actions and practices. It mediates our knowledge of the world.

Let’s take again the example of Covid-19. Who should take responsibility for the impact of technological solutions like Corona applications for the mobile phone? The developers? The policymakers? The people using the platform?

Well, all of them should tackle the ethical questions this technology brings.

There should be a way to anticipate the impact of the technology during the design process and account for the values and norms of society.

Peter-Paul Verbeek, Professor Philosophy of Technology

How to tackle challenges in a responsible way, then? How can we make sure that what we design today will not negatively impact our tomorrow?

“The design of technology is doing ethics with other means”

OPPORTUNITIES AHEAD

It is difficult to find a common language and common ground, without patronising each other. Collaboration in a balanced way is hard, we need ways to adopt attitudes, develop trust; we need holistic understanding when we need to dialogue among disciplines, experiences, and life experiences; we need to find a common way to look at the challenge; moral reflection and anticipation of the impact of technology are often too abstract for practice.

Many society-centered and responsible innovation approaches share our focus on responsible design, incorporating theories and frameworks from the philosophy of technology. However, those approaches do not focus on including stakeholders as partners in the design process, but rather as informants. Many researchers already embrace transdisciplinary practices, but in the most projects, researchers retain the role of facilitator and provider of knowledge.

We believe that the expertise of citizens, industry, government, scientists, and designers should be valued equally. We should promote partnership in the design process: mindful of differences and capitalising on the knowledge that each stakeholder can bring in the collaboration.

Other approaches and frameworks share our transdisciplinary focus, but they do not enable fully critical co-creation, co-design, co-imagination focusing on decision-making processes rather than shaping processes.

Responsible Futuring offers a combination of transdisciplinary practices, responsible design and co-design with societal stakeholders that makes it stand out in the current state of the art.

What transdisciplinarity means

Transdisciplinarity is a term to define practices in which people work without firm barriers among disciplines to tackle societal challenges. In Transdisciplinarity, scientists and societal actors work together beyond the academic scope to tackle societal challenges and generate impact. We intend transdisciplinarity as a way to go beyond not only disciplines but also expertise. We believe society and science should work hand-in-hand and establish knowledge flows to generate a positive impact. We believe that scientists and stakeholders alike should become agents of change, hence empowering each other in the process. Involving all the stakeholders to the table means finding ways to learn from each other and comprehend each other. It entails being aware of each other worldviews, perspectives, and positions.

DESIGNLAB’S APPROACH

Responsible Futuring is a way to tackle societal challenges and co-shape the future we want to live in.

The approach strives to:

• Involve all societal stakeholders beyond disciplines and beyond each other’s expertise

• Focus on enabling stakeholders to gain a holistic understanding of societal challenges and framing and re-framing the issues the challenges pose;

• Bring values and norms into play: understanding each other responsibility when shaping solutions; and,

• Strive to anticipate the impact of technology we might develop to tackle a challenge mindful of the implications in the short and long term.

As such, Responsible Futuring is a form of collaborative moral reflection-in-action that enables academics, industry, government, students, and citizens to be aware of their role, reflect on the short-term and long-term impact of ideas and technologies, and ideate potential solutions with moral imagination.

Responsible Futuring is a way to deal with complex societal challenges and positively impact society. DesignLab’s approach is meant to enable societal stakeholders to reflect and understand a societal challenge and shape responsible solutions.

Rather than starting from solutions and technology, our approach starts from society and its challenges. The goal is to enable societal stakeholders to go beyond the boundaries of their expertise and contexts to collaborate and ideate on the challenges societies face.

Applying our approach means undergoing a generative and reflective process that challenges assumptions and highlights each other’s responsibilities.

Responsible Futuring supports placing societal values at the center; gaining deeper insights into the short and long-term implications of our actions.

What does that mean in practice?

It is difficult to find a common language and common ground, without patronising each other. Collaboration in a balanced way is hard, we need ways to adopt attitudes, develop trust; we need holistic understanding when we need to dialogue among disciplines, experiences, and life experiences; we need to find a common way to look at the challenge; moral reflection and anticipation of the impact of technology are often too abstract for practice.

Who is generating responsible solutions?

All the stakeholders, citizens included.

To clarify, stakeholders are societal actors belonging to one of the quadruple helix clusters (i.e., academia, industry, civic society and governmental organisations).

What does it mean to co-shape responsible futures?

It means involving stakeholders and work with them to build future scenarios, reflect on those scenarios and imagine what to develop. Hence, when tackling a societal challenge, we imagine the future by reflecting on the present’s issues, thereby providing an actionable outlook. We strive to shape desirable developments for society, thinking about the long-term implications.

We can never foresee the future. But what we can do: to visualise how the future might look and how it will affect us, through ethical reflection and speculative design.

Why should we involve society at all?

One of the focal drives of DesignLab is to co-design concepts and ideas on technology and other interventions that reflect societal values, norms, and behaviours. Stakeholders have valuable expertise; they are experts. Citizens, too, are experts of their experience. Instead of solely involving stakeholders, we actively engage them to reflect on value dynamics and practice value dynamism. Stakeholders are co-owners of the societal challenge, collaborators and co-actors.

At what level do we do this?

Stakeholders do so at macro, meso and micro level.

At the macro level, multiple forces play a role: the social, political, economic, technological, and environmental factors. All of these forces need to be taken into account when imagining and reflecting on futures. At the meso level, there are various aspects that relate to collective and organisational practices and influence specific future scenarios. At the micro-level, there are individual factors that influence the way we are going to be and feel in the future.

What are the pillars of our approach?

Enabling stakeholders to join forces, making thoughts and ideas tangible to support sense-making, ideate together with moral imagination, promoting citizen ethics and value change.

HOW THE APPROACH WORKS

The approach provides a framework to work within our vision and principles. Responsible Futuring consists of iterative phases that allow for multiple methods to be applied, depending on the stakeholders we are working with. It is fundamental. Yet, it is flexible: it does not give you a recipe to work on, but it gives you coordinates to follow the responsible futuring path. Below the description of the phases and what happens in each one of them.

1.Connect & Relate

In this phase, it is essential to bring together stakeholders and enable their collaboration. The focus is on three aspects of transdisciplinary collaboration.

First, we engage with worldviews. We explore how each stakeholder makes sense of the world, their views on human-technology relationships, society, and innovation.

Second, we engage in and understand value dynamics. We identify the values that stakeholders find essential, how they conceptualise them, the actions they take to embed those values in practice.

Third, we develop common ground by finding a way to communicate and understand each other even when having different perspectives. It is a phase to nurture team building and engage with stakeholders’ views coming from various disciplines.

The main output is a shared understanding of the diversity of worldviews involved in the process, and a foundation to create aconcrete plan to connect expertise in the team.

2.Understand & Frame

The main goal of this phase is to have an in-depth understanding of the challenge, the context, and the stakeholders that are involved in it. It is about bringing together worldviews and perspectives and putting them in context to gain knowledge and develop a shared transdisciplinary frame. The focus is on two main aspects:

First, it relates to gaining an in-depth knowledge of the relevant facets of the challenge and thinking of the implications the challenge has on the future from different perspectives. In this phase, we define patterns, relationships, and themes.

Second, it is about bringing different conflicts or dilemmas to the surface, as well as complementarities and synergies among stakeholders.

The activity is geared to produce a coherent set of statements to think with and act from a techno-moral perspective. This means stimulating ethical reflection, and adopting different lenses to flesh out the broader implications of potential actions in the present.

3.Imagine & Ideate

It is the most generative phase of the approach. In this phase, the focus is on imagining futures and ideating them tangibly. Hence, transdisciplinary teams will engage in tangible futuring exercises to develop and reflect on potential futures.

These activities can involve:

• The development of scenarios to bring to life how future situations, issues and dynamics can be;

• Prototyping current and future values by imagining and making low-fi prototypes according to values and taking moral stances into account; and

• Ideating, evoking and provoking reflections through making by imagining and ideating speculatively to reflect about the implications of ideas.

The output of this phase is a set of tangible representations of futures and abstract concepts to enable reflection, collaboration, and action.

4.Reflect & Reframe

In this phase, the focus is on reflecting on the insights gained from the different phases of the Responsible Futuring approach, re-evaluating ideas, concepts and perspectives to inform the creation of a new frame. The focus is on adopting a reflective attitude to inform decision making and adapt our current practices.

The outcome is a set of reflections, guiding principles and concrete actions to bring the lessons from the futuring exercises back to the present.

The outcomes of Responsible Futuring

Transdisciplinary methods and ways of working, co-creation methods, new ways of making sense of a challenge, new knowledge with societal perspective, tangible scenarios, ideation prototypes, ethical and moral analysis of ideas and technologies.

DESIGN PRINCIPLES

Design principles are widely applicable guidelines, rules and design considerations. They often stem from findings from psychology, sociology and anthropology. They matter because they define your departing ground; the foundation from which people can create something, they define a desired direction, a vision from which more concrete actions follow.

Within the Responsible Futuring approach, we take a broader definition of design principles. We identify 5 design principles, propositions that capture the theoretical framework of our approach. These principles constitute the core of the Responsible Futuring approach. They are meant to guide the implementation of the approach and development of methods, tools and techniques within the approach.

1.Frame the challenge

It is fundamental to collaboratively elaborate and make explicit the standpoint from which a challenge can be tackled: to frame the challenge. The first Responsible Futuring principle is to work on framing the challenge. But what does that mean?

Framing the challenge entails an in-depth understanding of the problem, teasing out and holistically reflecting on stakeholders’ multiple standpoints and finding metaphors that describe our frame. A frame is an organisational principle, a coherent set of statements to think with. It is actionable. It is a starting point for further thoughts and tangible solutions. It provides a common ground for the discussion of the problem and of the solution.

A frame is not static: throughout a process a frame can be challenged and re-elaborated (reframing).

The concept of framing. Framing is a concept originated in social science: it is the way we describe and make sense of people’s behaviour. Framing applies to many other aspects of life and to many other disciplines, particularly to design and decision making. When tackling an issue, designers carry out a sequence of reflective practices. Designers are reflective practitioners: they develop together standpoints from which a problematic situation can be tackled. They work to resolve or tease out controversies (i.e., a disagreement derived from conflicting points of view) or dilemmas (i.e., a situation in which a difficult choice has to be made between two or more alternatives, especially ones that are equally undesirable) and make sense of challenges collaboratively.

Analyse the problem at hand. There are many barriers to the process of framing and reframing. When stakeholders tackle a complex societal challenge, they often start with a solution in mind, without questioning the idea(s) they have about the challenge. This is a problem-solving attitude that is often productive but falls short when tackling complex societal challenges. One central tenet of the Responsible Futuring approach that we take from transdisciplinary working is not to jump to solution. It is fundamental to analyse the problem at hand. Stakeholders are invited to reflect and challenge their assumption: Is it an issue?

Is it more than one issue? What are the core aspects of the problem? Then, after analysing the challenge, stakeholders are invited to elaborate a new shared frame of the challenge informed by their analysis and reflections.

A frame beyond disciplines.

Elaborating a frame beyond disciplines and with people not trained in design practices is not easy. Transdisciplinary teams will have to go through non-linear processes: the issues, the problems will co-evolve with the solutions, bringing constant reflection and re-framing. The teams will have to challenge assumptions and fixations coming from their own expertise and experiences. This process does not happen in one or two sessions. It takes time and ad-hoc activities to nurture framing and reframing. There are enablers of the framing process: metaphors, analogies, sketching, doing research on the challenge. These enablers might be used in the transdisciplinary approaches as well, but they should be adapted.

2nd Principle: Enable stakeholders The second principle is enabling and involving stakeholders. Literally stakeholder means somebody that has interest and stake in a challenge. Stakeholders are societal actors belonging to one of the quadruple helix clusters (i.e., academia, industry, civic society and governmental organisations).

Acknowledging stakeholders’ expertise. Establishing collaboration between people with various backgrounds, perspectives, generations and culture is not an easy task. It is important to enable stakeholders to have awareness of their role in a transdisciplinary team, their value and their responsibilities. Design activities in the approach are geared to increase awareness of the values of each other’s expertise and role.

Professor Kees Dorst, University of Technology Sydney, describes the frame designers use to carry out productive reasoning as:

“Although frames are often paraphrased by a simple metaphor, they are in fact very complex sets of statements that include the specific perception of a problem situation, the (implicit) adoption of certain concepts to describe the situation, a ‘working principle’ that underpins a solution and the key thesis: IF we look at the problem situation from this viewpoint, and adopt the working principle associated with that position, THEN we will create the value we are striving for” (Dorst, 2011)

Establishing common ground, discussing roles, revealing responsibilities. Traditionally, in Design Thinking and human-centred design practices, designers would try to find common ground with the people they are designing for with activities to build empathy. This is done through ethnography, survey methods, and generative co-design.

However, empathising creates a disparity between the designer and the people to design for. Even when the designer takes the role of facilitator in the design process, the ultimate reflective role is in the hand of the designer. The asymmetry falls short in enabling multiple parties with the various backgrounds to join the reflection in actions. While a division of work and roles is fruitful, the pitfall of this approach is a sort of messianic role of the designer which can be perceived as patronising the people we are supposedly designing for.

There are power dynamics inherent to the process that need to be tackled. Moreover, involving all the stakeholders to the table means to find ways to learn from each other and work in ways that are comprehensible for each of the stakeholders.

That is why the DesignLab approach focuses on establishing common ground, discussing roles and revealing responsibility

“Finding common ground” is a technique people use to facilitate interpersonal relationships. To find common ground between parties, participants must search for signals of recognition, which are often subtle and prone to misunderstanding.

Discussing roles can be done in many ways, but from a transdisciplinary perspective it means integrating worldviews and establishing knowledge flows, in which we learn from each other and build on each other’s knowledge. Hence, we also merge and discuss disciplinary methods.

Furthermore, it is important that stakeholders become aware not only of their role but also of their responsibilities. Stakeholders explore what impact their decisions, perspectives and actions, plus they become aware about what they are accountable for in a design process, sharing their methods.

3rd Principle: Tangibilising

The third principle is related to making thoughts, ideas, perspectives tangible. In other words, to make it visible and embody them in physical representations, such as visualisations, maps, dioramas, prototypes, physical objects. We define “Tangibilising” as an act that supports sense-making, facilitates the design process and the collaboration among stakeholders.

Ideas, thoughts, perspectives, points of view are often difficult to express. Bringing a message across through words or written text is not trivial: the message needs to be heard, read and understood correctly. In particular, communicating ideas, thoughts, perspective and points of views about complex issues entail many interconnected relationships, facets and implications. Hence, the complexity of communication is higher.

Communicating ideas, thoughts and perspectives is fundamental in any participatory process, particularly when collaborating in transdisciplinary ways to tackle societal challenges. But even, facts, realities and concepts are difficult to communicate only with words. By communicating with written or spoken words it is also difficult to collaborate on thoughts, facts, perspectives.

One way to go, to make ideas and points of view more transparent is to use visualisation or physical representations. In so doing we allow a greater comprehension or even stimulate new perspectives to be expressed. In Responsible Futuring, when we engage in “tangibilising” we engage in visualising, in cognitive unloading, probing.

Visualising. By visualising we mean sketching, making maps, doodling and constructing with objects. All these actions are meant to “represent” complex problems, perspectives, dynamics and points of view. Visualising is known to be a powerful way to engage people in “representing” meaning instead of facts and opinions. The purpose is not to make a realistic picture, but to present an insight. It enables reflective interpretation.

1. to attract people to engage with the visualisation a designer should consider reducing perceived complexity and enable them to notice the backstories at hand;

2. to support sense making, a designer should consider two possibilities: structuring the visualisation in such a way that it helps identify and understand the different perspectives involved, or designing it in such a way that it engages people for a longer period of time to explore the multiple perspectives;

3. to enable reflection a designer should consider relating perspectives to each other as a space of contestation. Particularly, the aspect of attracting engagement with a visualisation sparks our attention for the purpose of triggering participation” (p.182)

Cognitive unloading. Our thoughts and ideas are not only processed in our mind. Much of human cognition is embodied: it resides in the body. Our cognitive activity, for example trying to understand how a complex construction works to build a puzzle, is enhanced by movements and actions that can simplify the task. For example, in solving a jigsaw puzzle, a person might offload some of the difficult tasks of visualising puzzle pieces by rotating the pieces with her hands and making spatial comparisons. This is a form of cognitive unloading: we transfer our thoughts into actions and object manipulation to better understand or reflect an idea, a point of view, a concept. Hence, through activities that nurture cognitive unloading we can support stakeholders’ collaborative sense-making.

Probing. Probes are materials to provoke or elicit response. In the field of design research and humancomputer interaction, probes are objects that help people self-reflect and self-document dynamics, experiences and perspectives and make them tangible through pictures, diaries, objects, colleagues etc. Probes help gather and represent accounts from people’s lives, values and thoughts. Through probes stakeholders engage in reflective participation, becoming aware of actions and interactions and describing them in some way, and making actions accountable. Probes also provoke reflection and evoke the ‘materialisation of the speculative’.

Schoffelen et al (2015) identify three ways in which is possible to enable stakeholders to make sense of complex challenges, perspectives and point of view through visualisation:

4th Principle: Ideate with moral imagination

In our approach, we strive to ideate to guide stakeholders’ imagination in such ways that it enables them to see things they could not see otherwise, such as the impact of technology on values, norms and actions of people in society. Theories about humantechnology relations and the interactions between technology and society can provide such guidance if combined with design practices. Ideation is usually very hard without proper training. One of the main hurdles is to convey ideas and reflect at the same time: logical constraints and resistance to the process makes it hard. Ideating with moral imagination requires activities and a platform to facilitate stakeholders to access that knowledge hidden deep in their hearts and heads.

5th Principle: Positive and Generative Ethics

In Responsible Futuring, stakeholders reflect and ideate with morality in mind. They identify and reflect on values and responsibilities. They are doing “ethics with other means” when engaging in the design process. Hence, the 5th principle of our approach has to do with the ways we intend stakeholders to engage in ethics. Typically, ethical practices are concerned with the formulation of principles and guidelines. Philosophers and ethicists define them and then evaluate them. Our perspective stems from the work of Peter-Paul Verbeek regarding moralising technology and the Guidance ethics approach.

Cambridge dictionary

Ethics drive responsible solutions. Instead of focusing on the top-down formulation of principles and guidelines, Responsible Futuring enables stakeholders to identify the values that are at stake in relation to a specific technological solution to a societal challenge. Reflection and ideation are done with values and norms in mind. Responsible Futuring ethics is not meant to hinder creativity or to demarcate what is not desirable. Values, norms and ethical considerations aim to shape the conditions for what we do want and help shape the desirable solutions. Hence, ethics are seen as a positive and generative drive for responsible solutions.

Supporting materials

• YouTube video: moralising technology by Peter-Paul Verbeek.

• Dorst, K. (2011). The core of ‘design thinking’and its application. Design studies, 32(6), 521-532.

• Schoffelen, J., Claes, S., Huybrechts, L., Martens, S., Chua, A., & Moere, A.V. (2015). Visualising things. Perspectives on how to make things public through visualisation. CoDesign, 11(3-4), 179-192.

Ideation is a process to generate ideas, to tackle a problem or a situation. Ideation is an imaginative action that produces ideas. Imagination is the faculty or action of forming new ideas, or images or concepts of external objects not present to the senses.