Genesis of the Project
The development of a culture of intensive innovation and new models of innovation (Le Masson et al. 2006) has led to the implementation of new forms of governance (Von Hippel 2005; Callon et al. 2001). In this context, SSH researchers are increasingly being called upon to participate in the development of advanced technologies and innovations (nanotechnologies, robotics, etc.) from the earliest stages. These changes have led numerous national governments to prompt researchers from the SSH, the natural sciences, and the health sciences to come together in groups focused on what are known as E3LS issues (ethical, environmental, economic, legal, and social). This is the context in which the interdisciplinary research group called InterNE3LS was created (of which more below). InterNE3LS undertook the development of a framework for the analysis of nanotechnologies’ impacts and ethical acceptability (Patenaude et al. 2015), which can be summarized thus: At the conceptual level, the analytic framework is intended to make explicit those various operations required in preparing a judgment about the acceptability of technologies that have been implicit in the classical analysis of toxicological risk. Not only the toxicological impacts of (nano)technologies must be considered but also the social impacts of the various uses of (nano)products. The attendant shift in perspective also implies reexamining the role of values and value judgments in the process of ethical assessment and understanding how they operate in decision-making. Finally, the framework challenges democratic societies to open up to public debate the social choices involved in developing a specific technology. On a practical level, the framework is a reflective tool that makes it possible to take into account all the dimensions involved in given technological developments and understand the reasons invoked in determining impacts, assessing them, and arriving at a judgment about acceptability. If one wishes to surmount the many antagonisms in debates about technology, this analytic framework will serve as a tool indispensable to any individual, group, or committee formulating ethical opinions and wishing to take a stand on technological devices. Similarly, this reflective tool could serve researchers and industrial backers as a way of integrating the dimension of ethical acceptability into the process of development of devices. Thus, enabled to better account for its choices, technological development becomes “responsible”, that is, accountable. Assessments undertaken with this framework are based on anticipated uses, which are necessarily “social”.
This rather “macro” perspective on impact and ethical-acceptability analysis could only become an approach for supporting technological development by enrichment with a somewhat “micro” perspective which has already been subject to numerous studies, in particular under the label “user experience”. With just that aim of integrating the two perspectives, the authors’ research group, InterNE3LS at Université de SherbrookeFootnote2 (in Sherbrooke, Canada), joined forces with the CEA (French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission), Footnote3 the latter of which has unique expertise in the field of user experience. For certain SSH disciplines, sociology in particular, entry into the world of “technological democracy” marked a “practitioner-centered turning point” (“tournant praticien”) (Piriou 2008) that led to the development of practices involving unprecedented closeness to technological laboratories, upstream of the processes of design and far from the “final” product.
The next section outlines the characteristics of the two approaches that are deployed in the RSU support procedure introduced herein.