New Tools for Science Policy

Deliberating Differently

The Futurescape City Tours

How can we create a more inclusive, sustainable, and integrated public engagement experience? Can visual forms of communication provide means of facilitating critical dialogue and representing citizens’ values, desires, concerns, and curiosities about emerging technologies? Could we combine walking tour, photography, guided deliberation, behind-the-scenes expeditions, and informal conversations with city planners, policymakers, researchers, and civic leaders to embed participants’ values into local systems of innovation?

About the Seminar

October 23, 2014 8:30am

In an effort to create a more inclusive, sustainable, and integrated public engagement experience, researchers at the Center for Nanotechnology in Society at Arizona State University (CNS-ASU) developed Futurescape City Tours (FCTs).  Begun as a pilot in Phoenix in 2012, in 2013 the FCT expanded its scale to include engagements in St. Paul, Portland, Springfield (MA), Edmonton (Canada), and Washington, DC, in addition to Phoenix.

In each city, participants, stakeholders, and experts considered the relationship among emerging technologies, urban environments, and sustainability. Combining a walking tour, photography, guided deliberation, behind-the-scenes expeditions, and informal conversations with city planners, policymakers, researchers, and civic leaders, FCTs attempt to embed participants’ values into local systems of innovation.

The seminar will examine “material deliberations” as the work participants do to place knowledge into context (values, desires, emotions) through a close look at the experiences of participants from Washington DC.  We argue that visual forms of communication are powerful means of facilitating critical dialogue and representing citizens’ values, desires, concerns, and curiosities about emerging technologies. Preliminary data suggest that visual representations allow participants to formulate more complex, critical, and creative thinking.

Location Information

1834 Connecticut Ave NW, Washington, DC 20009
Sponsosored by:
ASU Office of the President
Consortium for Science, Policy and Outcomes

Links

Speakers

Kathryn De Ridder-Vignone

Former CNS Postdoctoral Researcher

Kathryn de Ridder-Vignone is an assistant professor of social context in the Department of Integrated Science and Technology at James Madison University. Prior to that she spent two years as a post doctoral research associate at the Center for Nanotechnology…

David Tomblin

Director, Science, Technology and Society Program, A. James Clark School of Engineering, University of Maryland, College Park

David Tomblin works on issues surrounding the governance of and public engagement with emerging technologies and has taught STS and related courses at the University of Maryland since 2009. He succeeded Betsy Mendelsohn as Director of STS programs in College…

Seminar Video

Past Series