The reference model for approaches used by the Open Innovation team at the CEA is known as CAUTIC® (an acronym from the French words for “use-assisted design for technology, innovation, and change”) (Mallein and Toussaint 1994; Pizelle et al. 2014). The model is a part of the school of thought known as the French Uses School (Jouët 2000; Jauréguiberry 2008; Jauréguiberry and Proulx 2011; Proulx 2015), which originated in France in the 1970s in a twofold context of change, economic and technological. This school of thought proclaimed the end of the Fordist model of growth (which is based on cost lowering and rationalizing production and is underpinned by a logic of technological determinism) and recognized the onset of an explosion in information-and communications-technology supply. Many of its publications call for the taking of users and uses, i.e., use value, into account in the supply-and-demand equation. The sociological approach taken here is thus attentive to users, who are seen not as mere passive consumers but as active players in the rise and fall of supply and demand.
The vision presented in Mallein and Toussain (1994) was given theoretical underpinnings and operationalized in the CAUTIC® model, which is intended to come into play in the design process as an “apparatus” allowing for the inclusion of the matter of “uses” and “users” in the cycle of design innovation.
The aim of the CAUTIC® model is to better understand the meanings of a new technological device. It brings these meanings to the attention of designers involved in projects, thus revealing potential gaps between the uses prescribed by backers and those envisaged by users. The idea is that emphasizing these gaps will then make it possible to alter the design path in order to improve the device’s use quality. “If designers use the knowledge thus produced, incorporating it into their products and services, those products and services will feature excellent quality of use, they will have high use value, which will foster rapid development of the associated engineering and the appropriate technology. If designers don’t do this, if for example they replicate the process of imposing technologies thought out solely by design engineers, there is every possibility they will launch products and services ill-suited to use, with no use meaning for most people, and run a sure risk” (Froger and Mallein 1997, p. 359).
This “French” approach, which for many years saw success in France alone, is today discernible in studies and frameworks of analysis produced by Anglo-American researchers on early adopters (Von Hippel 2005) and in the fields of user-centered approaches (Salvador et al. 1999; Chesbrough 2003), human–computer interactions, human factors (ergonomics), computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW), and internet studies and science and technology studies (STS). Many sociologists, ergonomists, and IT specialists no longer doubt the importance of taking actual or projected uses into account in thinking about innovation. Nevertheless, the approach has its limits. While it does enable clearer thinking about the microsociological relationship between a person and an artifact, it deals very little with issues of context (institutional, regulatory) and still less with the cultural and societal issues that form the background for any introduction into society. But innovation is the result of an encounter between a supply and a demand, and this tension requires us to think about the cultural and social context (the conditions for implementation of a device). This is the key factor that drove the view proposed here to take account of the issues in applied ethics that are foundational to such collaboration on the “responsible social uses” approach.
