By Travis McKnight, The United States is moving increasingly closer to an oil shortage shock that will make the 1973 fuel fiasco, in which prices quadrupled in mere months and people stood in line for hours to fill up a…

Latasha Ball and Eric Kennedy, students of CSPO faculty member Gregg Zachary, provide a revealing glimpse of two parallel technological systems in the Navajo nation in northern Arizona. Both systems deliver water to people, but in very different ways. In…

What is “environmental justice” and how can ordinary people hold engineers, and the socio-technological systems that underpin our daily lives, accountable? Gwen Ottinger sets about answering important questions about the pursuit of “responsible innovation,” and the barriers to achieving it,…

All of us at the Consortium for Science, Policy and Outcomes at Arizona State University mourn the passing of our colleague, assistant research professor David Conz. Dave’s kinetic curiosity and unshackled imagination focused on how things get made and who…

Video 7 – Decisions in Personal Lives This is the final video for the Nano and Society series. Click for Video 1, Video 2,  Video 3, Video 4, Video 5 and Video 6.  About the videos: To be an informed…

By Jayanta Chatterjee, An increasing number of parents seem to encourage their kids with adjectives like ‘awesome’ for a very average job. They congratulate children without thinking much if the ‘awesome culture’ increase the chance of future success by boosting…

Video 6 – Decisions in Innovation Systems This is Video 6 of a seven part series. Click for Video 1, Video 2,  Video 3, Video 4 and Video 5. About the videos: To be an informed citizen one must not…

Last week the ASU community lost an incredible thinker and activist, School of Sustainability Ph.D. student Arijit Guha. Arijit passed away March 22nd after what his family describes as a “spirited, graceful, and inspirational bout with cancer.” Diagnosed with Stage…

By Miles Brundage, Should we expect technological innovations to cure society’s problems? The media are filled with reports of cutting-edge breakthroughs in health, energy, computing, and other technology areas, often accompanied by the explicit or implicit hope that such breakthroughs…