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Nascimento, S., Angela Pereira & Alexandre Pólvora (2014). Ethical and Social Values, Public Engagement, and Responsible Innovation in Digital Fabrication Platforms. FAB10 / 10th International Fab Lab Conference.

S. F. Nascimento et al.,  "Ethical and Social Values, Public Engagement, and Responsible Innovation in Digital Fabrication Platforms", in FAB10 / 10th Int. Fab Lab Conf., Barcelona, 2014

@misc{nascimento2014_1716038219282,
	author = "Nascimento, S. and Angela Pereira and Alexandre Pólvora",
	title = "Ethical and Social Values, Public Engagement, and Responsible Innovation in Digital Fabrication Platforms",
	year = "2014",
	howpublished = "Other",
	url = ""
}

TY  - CPAPER
TI  - Ethical and Social Values, Public Engagement, and Responsible Innovation in Digital Fabrication Platforms
T2  - FAB10 / 10th International Fab Lab Conference
AU  - Nascimento, S.
AU  - Angela Pereira
AU  - Alexandre Pólvora
PY  - 2014
CY  - Barcelona
AB  - The realities of personal fabrication, open source culture, and peer-to-peer movements uphold a collaborative logic that is mingling together disciplinary and non-disciplinary fields with citizens and other stakeholders. The Fab Lab network covers a number of spaces and projects under a common rationale that any user, consumer, or citizen should be ultimately able to produce, use, share, copy and improve objects, systems or devices. Here you can find a grassroots approach coupling on one hand, the access to digital fabrication technology and rapid prototyping tools, and on other hand, the development of technical education and literacy, and the promotion of crowdsourced creativity and innovation. In this sense, it can be argued that Fab Labs embrace at their core ethical issues to include people from different backgrounds in defining research and innovation, as well as more inclusive representations and practices towards those who do not often master the required knowledge to fully participate. 

Our paper will focus on the conditions and challenges of this bottom-up approach in relation to current frameworks of responsible innovation, particularly on the purposes of aligning ethical norms, social values and societal needs in the acts of fabricating artefacts, through several directions of public engagement, deliberative governance, citizen science, DIY or grassroots science and technology development. We will analyze how the Fab Lab model and responsible innovation frameworks can overlap and germinate more debates on how ethical issues posed by stakeholders, citizens and communities themselves should inform the making of technologies. The possibility of devising prototypes in expanded scenarios shared by more and more people, can allow for each development phase to be reflected upon, decided or envisioned by a broader spectrum of actors, thus permitting the inclusion of a number of factors that aren’t exclusively technical in the assembly of what will be constructed. What are the main ethical guidelines to consider when making something in the most responsible way? How are current projects and initiatives incorporating issues such as normative principles in design, co-responsibility and reflexivity, anticipatory governance regarding intended and unintended consequences, or balanced involvement of individual and collective stakeholders in terms of age or gender? We will also explore current and emerging strategies for engaging citizens and communities in terms of their possible impacts or possible transformations to occur in concrete contexts and territories. Regarding for example open data initiatives based on participatory sensing, citizen monitoring or crowd data sharing in urban scenarios, we will introduce the discussion on the issues of transparency and reliability of citizen inputs to complement, and in some cases, change or redirect predominant knowledge. How can diverse forms of knowledge, tools and skills employed by citizens and communities be incorporated in research and innovation? What are the necessary conditions for citizens to continue their transformative actions over time? By which processes can they have a clear saying in decision-making in close collaboration with policy actors?
ER  -