TY - JOUR AB - Expectations play a distinctive role in shaping emerging technologies and producing hype cycles when a technology is adopted or fails on the market. To harness expectations, facilitate and provoke forward-looking discussions, and identify policy alternatives, futures studies are required. Here, expert anticipation of possible or probable future developments becomes extremely arbitrary beyond short-term prediction, and the results of futures studies are often controversial, divergent, or even contradictory; thus they are contested. Nevertheless, such socio-technical imaginaries may prescribe a future that seems attainable to those involved in the visioneering process, and other futures may thus become less likely and shaping them could become more difficult. This implies a need to broaden the debate on socio-technological development, creating spaces where policy, science, and society can become mutually responsive to each other. Laypeople’s experiential and value-based knowledge is highly relevant for complementing expertise to inform socially robust decision-making in science and technology. This paper presents the evolution of a transdisciplinary, forward-looking co-creation process — a demand-side approach developed to strengthen needs-driven research and innovation governance by cross-linking knowledge of laypeople, experts, and stakeholders. Three case studies serve as examples. We argue that this approach can be considered a method for adding social robustness to visioneering and to responsible socio-technical change. AU - Gudowsky, Niklas AU - Sotoudeh, Mahshid DA - 2017/12/31/ IS - No. 1 – Special Section: Visioneering Socio-technical Innovations JF - NanoEthics PY - 2017 SE - 2016/11/23/ SP - 93-106 TI - Into Blue Skies – Transdisciplinary Foresight and Co-creation as Socially Robust Tools for Visioneering Socio-technical Change UR - http://http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11569-017-0284-7 VL - 11 ER -