CANDID – Checking Assumptions and promoting responsibility in Smart Development

1) To facilitate a dialogue aiming at Responsible Research and Innovation between SSH researchers and researchers, engineers and innovators in the ICT – LEIT domains. 

Now underway, this dialogue, intended as a multi-directional check on assumptions: on predominant ICT – LEIT imaginaries and innovation agendas; and on the presuppositions operative in SSH communities who interact in one way or another with ICT – LEIT communities, collaborate or work alongside them. 

The project is introducing a network of extended peer reviewers, from civil society, public initiatives, users and various forms of relevant knowledge and experience, to comment on and guide the process of checking (thereby providing a third perspective from which to check assumptions).

2) To describe and critically assess visions of ‘smart’, within the ICT – LEIT programmes in Horizon 2020, and in public discourse more generally, for thematic & discursive analyses. 

This is primarily an analytic task, to enable a deeper assessment of ‘smart’ in terms of tangible practices (see Objective 3).

3) To describe and produce, in the form of distinct Modules, insights on crucial topics on Science and Society intersections, as they play out within and in relation to visions of ‘smart’. These Modules are:

Module 1 – User and Design Configurations
Module 2 – Risks, Rights and Engineering 
Module 3 – Sensing Infrastructures 

These Modules are intended to clarify and elaborate the complexity in ‘smart’ adaptation, and the inconclusiveness in design, engineering and user encounters. 

They will serve as:

• a guide to better collaboration between SSH-ICT expertise to improve on the assistive qualities of ‘smart’ innovations,
• a counter-narrative to simplistic depictions of ‘smartness’.
• a template for ICT – LEIT and SSH researchers and innovators who wish to address societal (including legal, ethical and governance) challenges.

The Modules will also function as enablers of wider stakeholder communications and will provide organising guides for scientists, engineers and innovators in ICT – LEIT to give feedback (checks on assumptions) to the SSH researchers working on the project. 

Ramón Ribera (TURBA/IN3)

Sara Degli-Esposti (Coventry University)

Daniel López

Principal Investigator

dlopezgo@uoc.edu