Public Engagement and Participatory Design Preparedness: Adapting Participatory Technology Assessment Methods for Design Science

Abstract The relationship over time between knowledge of a design’s performance and the impediments to its revision poses an important, fundamental design challenge. Early stages of design processes are characterized by maximal decision-making flexibility, but choices must be made with minimal knowledge of the impact they will have on operational performance. While knowledge of operational performance characteristics accumulates as a design matures, inherent forces of path dependency and lock-in tied to upstream design decisions increase the difficulty of implementing design changes downstream. To mitigate this challenge, some design processes utilize participatory methods involving early stakeholder engagement to yield a better understanding of the landscape of design expectations, hopes, and concerns. This information can be used to anticipate otherwise unforeseen downstream problems, the occurrence of which are not uncommon in sociotechnical system contexts distinguished by the inherent complexity of interacting social and technical elements. Recognizing the value of early engagement in the design process, this project explores the utility of methods derived from the Participatory Technology Assessment (pTA) methodology in a sociotechnical systems design context; specifically, that of fusion energy systems. We hypothesize that pTA as structured by the Expert and Citizen Assessment of Science and Technology (ECAST) network, originally designed over a decade ago and continually refined in the years since as a multi-phase public engagement methodology for post-normal science and technology policy decision-making support, may be a valuable pre-design tool for increasing participatory design preparedness. As an initial small-scale test of pTA, the project team, consisting of fusion physics, engineering, and pTA experts, conducted two pTA-style open-framing dialogues on energy sources, energy transitions, and fusion energy systems with members of the public recruited from the Madison, Wisconsin area. While preliminary, our findings suggest that pTA methods can be useful for investigating public framings of the greater context around a sociotechnical design challenge; public awareness and understandings of design-relevant technologies; public capacities to comprehend and discuss design-related educational materials; and public expectations, hopes, and concerns with a design’s technologies, all of which we conjecture can be used to refine the structure and content of participatory design engagements. Future experimentation embedding pTA methods in real or simulated design processes may provide highly valuable information for planning and executing participatory design engagements that themselves provide crucial information in the early stages of sociotechnical systems design.