Introduction: The capability approach and Innovation/Technology/Design

Infrastructures, Systems and ServicesTechnology, Policy and Managemen

Diseño de tecnología para el desarrollo humano - un enfoque de capacidades

Values, Technologty & InnovationTechnology, Policy and Managemen

Design for Development: A Capability Approach

In this article I suggest a ‘capability approach’ towards designing for society, and particularly, the world’s poor. I will explain that this approach assigns a central place to human capabilities in our discussions of justice and development and criticizes a focus on utility or preference satisfaction. In the literature on the capability approach technical artifacts have hardly been acknowledged as an input for human capabilities, although Sen and some other authors sometimes refer to the example of a bicycle that expand one’s capabilities to move about. Using Bijker’s analysis of the history of the development of the bicycle, I argue that the details of design are very important for an artifact’s impact on human capabilities. In current design practice the focus is, however, too much on things like usability and user satisfaction. Where Buchanan has argued that design should rather find its ultimate ground in human rights and human dignity, I propose human capabilities as an alternative. Due to the functionalistic orientation of the capability approach, this alternative may be more fruitful and appealing to for designers. Analogue to ‘value sensitive design’ – an emerging approach in the ethics of technology - we should thus look into the possibility of ‘capability sensitive design’. What this entails exactly should be investigated, but it is likely that it will turn out to have commonalities with existing design movements like participatory design and universal design. The article will end with some suggestions for further research on a capability approach of design.Values, Technology & InnovationTechnology, Policy and Managemen

How I learned to love the robot: capabilities, information technologies, and elderly care

Information technologies seem promising when it comes to improving elderly care, but they also raise ethical worries, for example about privacy, human contact, and justice. This paper argues that the capability approach is a helpful tool to make explicit what is at stake in this context and to discuss the relevant ethical issues. However, it is also proposed that we modify the capability approach by adopting a non-instrumental view of technology that takes into account how particular technologies change the meaning of the capabilities. This idea is further developed into suggestions for an ethical-hermeneutical interpretation of the capability approach, which involves the use of techno-moral imagination. To illustrate this, the paper explores and discusses an elderly care scenario in which people’s capabilities for social affiliation and engagement in relations with non-humans are transformed by information technology

Responsible innovation in practice : the adoption of solar PV in telecom towers in Indonesia

The adoption of solar PV in telecom towers is considered as a sustainable innovation in powering the towers. Such adoption involves different actors which hold different tasks and responsibilities. However, the inclination that comes up among the actors involved is that if and when a disaster occurs (e.g. telecom systems collapse) due to the failure in the operation and management of solar PV after its installation, they will most likely be prone to finger-pointing at each other. In such situation, the questions arise: how to locate the accountability, who should be accountable to whom and for what, and how to proportionally distribute the accountability? Through a case study in Indonesia, this paper discusses and analyzes how to address such issue by undertaking stakeholder and impact analysis and analysis of five dimensions of responsible innovation namely: anticipation, reflexivity, responsiveness, deliberation, and participation. Our analysis suggests that there is a need of an innovative way or technology that can proportionally distribute the accountability of actors involved. The paper also concludes that innovation without responsibility faces dangers of rejection or less acceptability of even greener and sustainable technology