Shaping Technology Guiding Policy

Download or read book Shaping Technology, Guiding Policy written by Knut H. Sørensen and published by Edward Elgar Publishing. This book was released on 2002 with total page 434 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This text evolved from the European COST A4 Action on the Social Shaping of Technology 1991-9, a coordinated effort of national scientific and technical research conducted on a European level. In this collection of 13 essays, 15 international scholars explore several issues regarding social shaping technology (SST), including the development of SST as a research area; the main concepts and approaches emerging within the area of SST; the new explanatory frameworks, concepts and tools which have recently emerged; and how these findings contribute to policy and public and commercial intervention around technological innovation. For academics and researchers in science and technology studies, technology policy, and the management of technology, and for technology policymakers and practitioners. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Download or read book Presenting Futures written by Erik Fisher and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2008-05-22 with total page 319 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Welcome to the ?rst volume of the Yearbook of Nanotechnology in Society! Nanotechnology, hailed as “the next industrial revolution” (NSTC 2000) and c- tiqued for being little more than “hype” (Berube 2006), is the site of a great deal of social and intellectual contest. With some ten billion dollars being spent worldwide on nanotechnology research and development annually and a market forecast of trillions of dollars in sales in the medium-term future (Lux Research 2006), nations and ?rms are pursuing nano-related goals with high levels of both effort and - pectations. Yet according to the Woodrow Wilson International Center’s web-based Nanotechnology Consumer Products Inventory, most of the more than 500 na- products on the market as of this writing are basic consumer items—cosmetics, clothing, athletic equipment and the like—with modest, incremental improvements on their non-nano counterparts. Nanotechnology is also the site of an increasing amount of scholarship dedicated to understanding the interactions between society and an emerging knowled- based technological endeavor. Searching the Web of Science indices in social s- ence and humanities for nanotech* and nanoparticle*, for example, yields 231 hits 1 since 1990, but 75 percent of these occur in 2004 through 2007. This scholarship attempts to fathom the implications of nanotechnologies for society, as well as the implications for nanotechnologies of society. Some of it is also engaged in dialogue with both the public and with nanotechnology researchers about the hope and the hype described above.

Download or read book Future-Oriented Technology Analysis written by Cristiano Cagnin and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2008-07-29 with total page 169 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The application of foresight to address the challenges of uncertainty and rapid change has grown dramatically in the past decade. In that period, the techniques have been greatly refined and the scope has been broadened to encompass future-oriented technology analysis (FTA) and more recently, the concept and practice of strategic intelligence. FTA addresses directly the longer-term future through the active and continuous development of visions, and pathways to realise these visions. It is increasingly seen as a valuable management and policy tool complementing, and extending further into the future, classical strategy, planning, and decision-making approaches. This book charts the development of FTA and provides the first coherent description and analysis of its practical application and impact in the worlds of business, government, education and research in both advanced and developing countries. It draws on papers addressing the application of FTA around the globe which were presented at the Second International Seville Seminar in September 2006. The insights and practical experience will be invaluable for company managers, government ministers and officials, researchers and academics with responsibilities for effective planning and decision-making in an increasingly turbulent and unpredictable world.

Download or read book The New Production of Users written by Sampsa Hyysalo and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-20 with total page 358 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Behind the steady stream of new products, technologies, systems and services in our modern societies there is prolonged and complicated battle around the role of users. How should designers get to know the users’ interests and needs? Who should speak for the users? How may designers collaborate with users and in what ways may users take innovation into their own hands? The New Production of Users offers a rare overview of these issues. It traces the history of designer-user relations from the era of mass production to the present days. Its focus lies in elaborating the currently emerging strategies and approaches to user involvement in business and citizen contexts. It analyses the challenges in the practical collaborations between designers and users, and it investigates a number of cases, where groups of users collectively took charge of innovation. In addition to a number of new case studies, the book provides a thorough account of theories of user involvement as well as and offers further developments to these theories. As a part of this, the book relates to the wide spectrum of fields currently associated with user involvement, such as user-centered design, participatory design, user innovation, open source software, cocreation and peer production. Exploring the nexus between users and designers, between efforts to democratize innovation and to mobilize users for commercial purposes, this multi-disciplinary book will be of great interest to academics, policy makers and practitioners in fields such as Innovation Studies, Innovation Policy, Science and Technology Studies, Cultural Studies, Consumption studies, Marketing, e-commerce, Media Studies as well as Design research.

Download or read book Handbook on Science and Public Policy written by Dagmar Simon and published by Edward Elgar Publishing. This book was released on 2019 with total page 585 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Handbook assembles state-of-the-art insights into the co-evolutionary and precarious relations between science and public policy. Beyond this, it also offers a fresh outlook on emerging challenges for science (including technology and innovation) in changing societies, and related policy requirements, as well as the challenges for public policy in view of science-driven economic, societal, and cultural changes. In short, this book deals with science as a policy-triggered project as well as public policy as a science-driven venture.

Download or read book Governing Technology for Sustainability written by Joseph Murphy and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2012-06-25 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a world of growing complexity and dwindling resources, the relationship between technology and sustainability is a pressing issue of concern at the highest levels. This book improves our understanding by examining the ways that people, technology and governance shape each other with implications for sustainability. It is the first book to link technology studies and governance research to this problem. Contributions from leading environmental social scientists are included, with each chapter reporting on new research and tackling complex, but vital issues. Drawing on examples such as wave and tidal power, wind power, micro-generation, community waste recycling and eco-housing, the book provides powerful new insights into the governance of technology for sustainability. A detailed introduction and conclusion discuss existing research directions and identify the contribution that the book makes in advancing our understanding of the people-technology-governance nexus and its implications for sustainability. This is essential reading for all those in academia, government and industry working at the critical interface between how we develop, deploy and govern technology in the pursuit of sustainability.

Download or read book Health Technology Development and Use written by Sampsa Hyysalo and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2010-06-22 with total page 355 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How do development and use of new technology relate? How can users contribute to innovation? This volume is the first to study these questions by following particular technologies over several product launches in detail. It examines the emergence of inventive ideas about future technology and uses, how these are developed into products and embedded in health care practices, and how the form and impact of these technologies then evolves through several rounds of design and deployment across different types of organizations. Examining these processes through three case studies of health care innovations, these studies reveal a blind spot in extant research on development-use relations. The majority of studies have examined shorter ‘episodes’: moments within particular design projects, implementation processes, usability evaluations, and human-machine interactions. Studies with longer time-frames have resorted to a relatively coarse ‘grain-size’ of analysis and hence lost sight of how the interchange is actually done. As a result there are no social science, information systems, or management texts which comprehensively or adequately address: • how different moments, sites and modes of shaping new technology determine the evolution of new technology; • the detailed mechanisms of learning, interaction, and domination between different actors and technology during these drawn out processes; and • the relationship of technology projects and the professional practices and social imaginations that are associated in technology development, evaluation, and usage. The "biographies of technologies and practices" approach to new technology advanced in this volume offers us urgent new insight to core empirical and theoretical questions about how and where development projects gain their representations of future use and users, how usage is actually designed, how users’ requests and modifications affect designs, and what kind of learning takes place between developers and users in different phases of innovation—all crucial to our understanding and ability to advance new health technology, and innovation more generally.