Ulrike Bechtold

Background: European research policy promotes active assisted living (AAL) to alleviate costs and reach new markets. The main argument for massive investments in AAL is its potential to raise older adults’ Quality of Life and enhance their freedom, autonomy, mobility, social integration, and communication. However, AAL is less widely spread in older adults’ households than expected. Research Aim: We investigate how the variable “technology acceptance” is connected to socio-economic-, social, health, “personal attitude towards ageing”, and “Quality of life” variables. Method: We conducted a study in Vienna between 2018 and 2020, questioning 245 older adults (M = 74, SD = 6.654) living in private homes. We calculated multivariate models regressing technology acceptance on the various exploratory and confounding variables. Results: Experiencing an event that made the person perceive their age differently changed the attitude towards using an assistive technological system. Participants perceived technology that is directly associated with another human being (e.g., the use of technology to communicate with a physician) more positively. Conclusion: Older adults’ attitudes towards technology may change throughout their lives. Using major events in life as potential entry points for technology requires awareness to avoid reducing the lives of older adults to these events. Secondly, a certain human preference for “human technology” may facilitate abuse if technology is given a white coat, two eyes, a nose, and a mouth that may falsely be associated with a natural person. This aspect raises the ethical issue of accurate information as a significant precondition for informed consent.

Traditionally, expert-based forward looking has been applied to anticipate future challenges, solutions and strategic decisions, but limitations to this approach have become obvious – especially when considering long term perspectives – e.g. failing to include a comprehensive array of opinions. Aiming at producing sustainable strategies for responsible socio-technical change, research funding can benefit from combining forward looking and public participation to elicit socially robust knowledge from consulting with multi-actors, including citizens. In this paper, we give insights into the EU project CIMULACT – Citizen and Multi-Actor Consultation on Horizon 2020. In CIMULACT, more than 4500 citizens, stakeholders and experts from 30 European countries engaged online and offline to co-create research topics. These are supposed to serve as input for the next round of calls in Horizon 2020, national research agendas as well as the ninth framework programme in the making. We investigate key results of this transdisciplinary process focussing on the topic “democratic education” with regard to two levels: What issues concerning the topic were raised? Can we find a common European imaginary for “democratic education”? Our analysis shows that the results contribute to defining and describing challenges for the currently prevailing imaginary of democratic education in Europe.

Ambient and assistive technologies (AT) have the potential to increase individual autonomy, social participation and quality of life for ageing populations. In seeking to implement these technologies, national and supranational funding schemes have strongly supported primarily market-driven research activities. This means that other societally relevant aspects, such as specific social and cultural contexts, are likely to be underestimated if not neglected. In view of the development of RI, this would be a serious misconception. We examine three recent participatory forward-looking technology assessment studies that involved experts, stakeholders and laypersons in discussions about the future of ageing and AT, and identify the diverse futures they imagine. We show different ways an ageing society of the future can be pictured, and contribute to the discourse on European demographic change as a Grand Challenge. In the light of RI, this diversity of imagined futures underlines the finding that answers to societal challenges connected to an ageing population cannot only be found by means of technological solutions, societal aspects will also play an important role.

An increasing orientation of technology assessment (TA) and adjacent fields toward future socio-technological developments is leading scholars to examine, assess and adapt different approaches of future studies on various levels. In this special issue of the Journal of Responsible Innovation, a number of members of the extended TA community in Europe seek to advance different approaches to handling the unpredictable, to consider various possible socio-technical futures and to explore a more active role in technology design and shaping of the future as required by concepts such as responsible innovation (RI) or responsible research and innovation (RRI). The three German words ‘Zukunft Macht Technik’ (the title of a TA conference in Vienna in 2015) make a nice little pun in German: they can either be interpreted as the short sentence ‘Future shapes technology’ or as the assembly of the three nouns ‘future power technology.’ Both readings are borne in mind in this special issue. A main insight of this special issue is that we need to explore how the debate on imagined socio-technical futures is enriched by concepts such as R(R)I, taking into account that no future can exist without an awareness of the present setting of innovation processes and technology development.

Hellseherei ist eine alte Kunst. Der Glaube an eine vorherbestimmte Zukunft hat zur Entwicklung der skurrilsten Werkzeuge, mit denen sich diese vorhersehen lassen sollen, geführt. Auf den ersten Blick haben vorausschauende Studien auch immer einen Anschein von Wahrsagerei. Im Gegensatz zum Handlesen versuchen wissenschaftliche Methoden aber lediglich Wege zu zeigen, auf denen sich eine offene Zukunft entwickeln kann. Hinter solchen vorausschauenden Studien steckt oft die Motivation, eine breitere Informationsbasis für EntscheidungträgerInnen zu schaffen, die die Möglichkeit haben, die Zukunft aktiv mitzugestalten. ExpertInnen, StakeholderInnen und Laien können verschiedene Wertvorstellungen und Prioritäten haben, woraus sich unterschiedliche Standpunkte zu verschiedenen Fragestellungen ergeben. Die Einbeziehung einer möglichst breiten Basis solcher Standpunkte kann im besten Fall zu robusteren Entscheidungen und Strategien führen. Dabei stellt die Verarbeitung dieser Diversität in eine für EntscheidungsträgerInnen brauchbare Form eine Herausforderung an das Design und die Durchführung jeden partizipativen Prozesses dar. In diesem Beitrag wird eine neue qualitative Methode für vorausschauende Studien vorgestellt (CIVISTI: Citizen Visions on Science, Technology and Innovation; www.civisti.org), die in einem gleichnamigen EU-Projekt entwickelt wurde und kritisch durchleuchtet wird. Die Methode integriert das Wissen verschiedener Gruppen um Empfehlungen für die Forschungs- und Förderungspolitik zu erarbeiten. Der Schwerpunkt liegt dabei auf Partizipation mit klar getrennten Rollen von BürgerInnen und ExpertInnen. Am Beginn des Prozesses entwickeln BürgerInnen Visionen für eine Zukunft in 30–40 Jahren, aus denen ExpertInnen und StakeholderInnen die Empfehlungen generieren. Diese werden dann an die BürgerInnen zur Bewertung zurückgegeben um ein Endprodukt zu erzeugen. Der folgende Beitrag soll Stärken, Schwächen und Verbesserungspotentiale der Methode aufzeigen.

The establishment of new interdisciplinary fields such as ecological economics, human ecology or technology assessment can be interpreted as a logical consequence of striving for new sustainability sciences that address current global, multi-dimensional and multi-scale challenges. They set out to bridge the gap between the natural and the social sphere, between scientific analysis and societal action. This papers aims at re-assessing the contribution of established inter-disciplines to sustainable development. Journal articles of ecological economics, technology assessment and science and technology studies are analysed and compared along several proposed features of sustainability science. The results converge in two crucial aspects. (1) Concise societal or political recommendations are not part of present day 'normal science', be it a disciplinary or an explicitly interdisciplinary research context. (2) Participatory exercises are rarely applied as a socio-politically embedded practice, despite a high interest in such exercises as an object of study and discussion.