Is our society sustainable?
Is innovation society sustainable? Yes!
If we understand our life is a storyboard and we learn how to share a common interpretation of the future…
The INSITE coordination action has been organized around a three year long conversation among scientists, policy makers and distributed innovation policy (DIPO) leaders, about the Innovation Society and its sustainability crises. The main focus of the conversation became how to change the way European society organizes its transformation processes, in order to achieve a higher level of social cohesion and to steer innovation processes in socially positive directions.
During INSITE’s three years of activities, INSITE participants had integrated social innovation into its initial critique of the Innovation Society, developing a vision of how social innovation could help European society to find a new way to organize its transformation processes. This vision provides a key role for future ICT and for the collective narratives designed to constructing Europe 2020.
The globalised society is going out of control, for many reasons: the innovation ideology, policies oriented to priming the pump of technical invention, instead of dynamically evaluating the cascade of consequences of new artefacts; a discrepancy in dimensionality between knowledge gained and impact of that knowledge on the environment, which is reaching a tipping point in which the possibility of a change in the sociotechnical system and not only in single sociotechnical regimes is imminent.
ICT is creating a unique opportunity to transform the extraction-to-waste economy into one that distributes information-processing capacity and wealth by enabling an important degree of decoupling between information flows and energy/matter flows. However, at the moment, our society lacks the concepts and means to orient its development in more socially promising directions. This is the case because nobody has addressed, so far, with a usable robust methodology, the problems of monitoring and steering in socially positive directions the cascades of unexpected social and attributional transformations that the appearance of ICT artefacts has produced during the last forty years.
The Life is a storyboard video aims at communicating the INSITE discoveries to the wide public of social innovators in Europe, opening a call for “stories” addressing examples of “sliding” options that changed somebody’s life or the story of a community.
We ask all the people interested to continue the discussion launched by INSITE to send us impressions, papers, video and other innovative contributions to the debate.
The key item is: how can we understand, control and influence the cascade of unattended consequences of a promising innovation or collective action?
