Transformative Vision Assessment and 3-D Printing Futures: A New Approach of Technology Assessment to Address Grand Societal Challenges
本文提出“变革性愿景评估”这一技术评估新方法，通过分析并调节影响技术发展的愿景，增强科学与社会行动者的预见能力、反思性和责任感，并以3D打印案例展示如何通过愿景转化更好应对重大社会挑战的复杂性。
Grand societal challenges (GSCs) are complex phenomena. With technological innovation being often seen as a solution to them, technology assessment (TA) as problem-oriented research practice is challenged to reflexively address the relationship between GSC and technologies. The complexity involved requires that research and innovation are reflexively embedded into societal dynamics from early on. This is an aspect that contemporary innovation governance discourses in TA, “responsible research and innovation” and “anticipatory governance” highlight. This article elaborates the new TA approach of “transformative vision assessment.” It aims to enhance anticipatory competences, reflexivity, and responsibility of actors in science and society through modulating the visions that influence technological development. The approach responds to the dominant visions in public and scientific discourse that promise a technology-driven reorganization of society, e.g., a fourth industrial revolution, and fail to meet the complexity of GSC. Thus, transformative vision assessment analyses technological visions and modulates visionary discourse through adding sociotechnical complexity and fostering dialogue between science and society. This article uses a case study on scalable three-dimensional (3-D) printing to exemplify how visionary communication can be transformed to better address the complexity of GSC, with the focus of the case on 3-D printing and inclusion and sustainability.