Need-Oriented Research Planning

Seeking to strengthen the viability of innovations and to foster participatory research agendas, we transcend the conventional user-centered approach and re-orient the entire research and development process toward public preferences.

By drawing from design know-how and the social sciences, we develop original interaction and preference articulation formats that can enable laypersons to co-determine long-term innovation trajectories.

  • In particular, our method is centered on a guided multi-staged co-ideational process, in which laypersons  – people who participate non-professionally – envision potential innovations and develop ranges of hypothetical socio-technological scenarios – the so-called preference scenarios.
  • In the round-up stage of this process, a group of specialists from a range of professional fields project these scenarios into participatory technology roadmaps – by estimating when such developments will become technologically feasible, by arranging them on a timeline based on these estimates, and by identifying prospective research trajectories.

The purpose of such delayed professional evaluation is to find the balance between the lay input, in all its diversity, originality, and potential, and purely practical considerations. By projecting public needs and values into accessible scenarios and participatory technology roadmaps, our method can help foster widely accepted research trajectories and highly marketable technological advances.