Project Contacts and Acknowledgments
Project Participants
Nano Futures is an experiment in creating social engagement around anticipatory governance of nanotechnology. The scenes are extrapolations from current nanoscale research and vetted for technical plausibility by nanoscientists.
The Center for Nanotechnology in Society at Arizona State University (CNS-ASU) hopes that these scenes, which we are circulating to thousands of individuals, will stimulate reflection about the meanings, potentials and problems surrounding nanotechnology. The goal is to cultivate society's ability to govern the implications of its own ingenuity. [More information regarding who's participating in the project]
Plausible Futures
Of critical importance to the CNS-ASU Nano Futures project is that technical descriptions, or scenes, should be deemed plausible; therefore, a substantial vetting effort was made prior to their dissemination here. Through vetting for technical plausibility we mean to counter the lack of realism attending much of the popular discourse surrounding nanotechnology.
Once the scenes were developed, the process of vetting followed three main lines: (1) focus groups with scientists with relevant expertise, (2) bibliometric analysis of key words produced in the focus groups, (3) research mapping.
The Vetting Workshops exposed the scenes to relevant scientists for their evaluation of plausibility, timeliness, and relevance. During the vetting workshops, the scientists and engineers were asked if the scenes are feasible, and they were also asked to comment on the following parameters:
- Technical validation - Within the realm of current understanding, is this technology possible? Are the descriptions technically complete and accurate?
- Relevance - Does the scene capture what is interesting about this technological trajectory?
- Alternatives - Is there a more elegant or effective way of arriving at a similar function?
- Revisions - What changes should be made to the scene to make it more plausible?
In addition to the vetting criteria, the participants also were asked to generate search terms. The prompt was: If you were going to begin a research project devoted to this application, what search terms would you use to discover the state of the art? These five search terms could be specific, e.g., neuron chip, or general, e.g., bionano*.
CNS researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology then scoured 4700 publications pulled from Web of Science, Science Citation Index (Porter et al 2007). The search generated reports of top key words, relevant publications, top research institutions, lead authors and countries. Such data mining is another layer of establishing that these scenes are relevant, have ongoing research, and while not commercially developed, are underway in the lab. In this way, in addition to the live vetting in the workshops, the scenes are connected to published research and existing research activities in real time, thus providing evidence of actuality.
The last task of the vetting workshop was to produce a technology roadmap that basically answers, What kind of research is necessary to realize this product? A Roadmap is an exercise in reverse engineering that:
- Outlines and references current research
- Specifies direction or research threads (relevant to the product)
- Notes the technological obstacles that need to be overcome
- Estimates the dates for solutions/breakthroughs along the way
The roadmaps produced links between current R&D and future R&D that could eventually culminate in the product described in the scene. The outcome is a list of scientific problems and technical challenges with milestones of 2, 5, and 10 years. The roadmap measure serves as another means to frame conversation beyond "is this possible?" and asks researchers to specify their views. This structuring of time enabled the focus groups to specify in more detail the technical hurdles. In some instances, the construction of the roadmap lead to other pathways of developing more elegantly the same product, thus revising the scene.
The scientists for the vetting workshops were drawn from the ASU community. The scenes contain technological products that do not yet exist and often rely on the convergence of different disciplines for their development. Yet we have found that, especially with scientists advanced in their career, interdisciplinary understandings existed and could come to bear on analyzing the scenes.
The objective of the vetting workshops was not to help create scenes with predictive power, but to create scenes that are consistent with current scientific understanding. The checking of one's view of the future against others in the workshop, as well as validation (or not) through the other vetting mechanisms, provide multiple avenues to check plausibility. This does not suggest comprehensiveness, but rather, triangulation, an important concept in lieu of validation. In constructing these scenes, CNS-ASU researchers have been cognizant that to do much more would risk adding their own values to the scenes. Tthe purpose of this website is to gather input about values, not impose them. The above vetting procedures dealt with technical plausibility, and we hope that the activities on this site will deal with political, economic, environmental and social plausibility.
