STS and the Design of Futures

STS is one of the world’s most powerful tools for understanding in detail how human lives are integrated into scientific and technological arrangements and systems – and the consequences that flow from that integration for the kinds of lives that different people live. As humanity embarks on new projects of large-scale technological redesign, especially in such areas as the construction of clean energy systems and the widespread integration of artificial intelligence into human affairs, Science and Technology Studies (STS) has the opportunity to step into new roles in helping analyze, assess, and inform choices about the design of sociotechnological systems of the future. To do so, STS will need to adapt its tools toward future-oriented scholarship and engagement that helps people to more richly and deeply imagine what sociotechnological futures might look like, to more effectively redesign sociotechnological systems to achieve just and equitable outcomes, and to democratize processes of technological change more thoroughly. If done effectively, this adaptation of STS methods has the potential to undergird new schools – in parallel to and in collaboration with engineering schools that train people to bring new technologies into being – that train people and organizations to better evaluate how they use technologies in the construction of the societies and economies of the future.