The Fundamental Orientation of the RSU Approach

This procedure unfolds along two trajectories.

The first, the development trajectory, involves market-launching a device better adapted to its use setting because it satisfies societal expectations. The second is the trajectory of the players involved: designers, engineers, business people. For the procedure’s objective to be met, players need to be able to understand and assess how to incorporate the information obtained into technological development. The procedure does not impose any particular action scenario; rather, it aims to shed light on players’ choices. In that respect, the heart of the procedure as it unfolds with players consists of prompting them to engage in reflective practice in conducting their process; it aims to support responsible decision making.

All along the process that begins with the emergence of an initial idea and ends with the marketing, players will have to make decisions with consequences for subsequent events. The basic idea is simple: the better informed the decisions, the better their chances of being relevant and ensuring their hoped-for success. Every choice is made in the context of tensions among various value judgments about what is preferable, to be wished for, and desirable. When deciding on a purchase, consumers are always faced with determining whether they assign more value to this or that impact which the product will have on their practices. Moreover, they must deal with this question: “Given my financial circumstances, do I want to invest in this product rather than another?”

One can’t deny the complexity of decisions about purchases and the many variables that come into play in value judgments about a product and its impacts. The dimensions of value that the user-experience approach groups into honeycombs (UX-FR 2016)—useable, useful, reliable, accessible, and credible—are certainly relevant, as is the cultural meaning of use in design driven innovation. But is this sufficient? Beyond users’ simple acceptance of certain products, the dimension of the ethical acceptability of a product’s impacts in society has become an inescapable consideration of innovations.

Reflection on the ethical concerns related to technological development has caused the emergence of another dimension in decision making: that of impacts on life and society. Today, the term responsible innovation (Owen et al. 2013; Koops et al. 2015) is becoming increasingly familiar as a name for various approaches that aim, each in their way, to incorporate social considerations into technological development. Some approaches propose supporting technological development from the earliest stages, so that changes to the technology or the marketing processes that address social concerns can be made in time (Doorn et al. 2013).

The responsible social uses procedure thus aims to inform decision-makers, all along a product’s development process, about concerns raised by the product as relates not just to the user’s subjective experience, but also to all the stakeholder practices that might be changed by the product. The procedure is intended to incorporate in a dynamic way the technical dimension (feasibility), the economic dimension (marketability), and the social dimension (responsible uses).