This goal of this project is to understand the strategies, procedures, and institutional arrangements that would facilitate better steering of technological design. Design is understood as a broadly social activity including not only engineers and other professional designers but also those who purchase and use technological devices and systems, manufacturers, third parties who suffer side effects, government regulators, university researchers - the entire social process of innovating, utilizing, and revising technologies based in part on learning from experience. One part of this research is devoted to clarifying what `better` steering would involve. The method is to develop a full specification of the categories that can arise in technological endeavors. Examples include failing to put needed technologies on the design agenda, exacerbating social class inequalities (hazardous waste dumps in minority neighborhoods), and changing workplace technological processes in ways that interfere with quality of work life. The goal of the first half is to produce a finished framework that is complete, simple enough for many different scholars and other users to remember and utilize, and that clearly delineates the interrelationship among the categories of design risks and challenges. The second half attempts to determine what political-economic procedures and strategies would, in principle, be required to cope with each of the problems specified in the work of the first half. One of the approaches studied is that of constructive technology assessment, now emerging on a pilot scale in a few nations, principally The Netherlands and Denmark. The second approach is the researcher's own research on intelligent trial and error, which has found that catastrophic risks can be reduced substantially by following a set of commonsense guidelines. One of the questions to be answered is the extent to which these strategies offer an across-the-board solution to the many design challenges standing in the way of improved steering of technologies. p¤
