A new project has been achieved!

As I posted the last time, we have a great new to share with all of us: we have achieved an I+D project by the Government of Spain for threes years!

This project is called "Citizen Participation in Social Aproppiation of Knowledge and Technological Design Processes" head by Francisco Tirado and Miquel Domènech and funded by the Ministry of Economy and Finance. Government of Spain. It has begun on 1th January 2015 and it ends on 31th December 2017. His reference is CSO2014-59136-P.

We have made an "abstract" about his content and his future lines of investigation for these threes years:

In our societies of knowledge it is a usual topic to show the enormous difficulties that daily people experiment when they want to participate in the processes of definition of social politics and common services. Frequently, it is put forward that such situation is inevitable because of the mentioned politics and services are based on specific and complex technoscientific developments. Nevertheless, in the last decade it has appeared an important scientific and political tradition questioning that affirmation. This tradition poses lay people have the right to participate in the production of a knowledge and technology that is thought and designed in order to improve, precisely, their lives. Such participation means both a relevant improvement in the quality of our democracies and a better definition and acceptation of the technoscientific products and results.

Our research is based on this tradition and we propose the following hipothesis: the social appropiation of expert knowledge and the citizen participation conform a important democratic value. This has to be strengthen and the ways it works have to be deeply analysed in order to figure out the dimensions and variables that can facilitate a permanent relation between lay people and experts. In this sense, we put forward two main objectives:

1. To analyse the dimensions which are working in the social appropiation of expert knowledge. That is, to examine the psicosocial, cultural and individual elements that are intervening in that practice of appropiation.

2. To evaluate and to establish what kind of elements are facilitating the citizen participation in the development of expert knowledge and technology.

Every main objective is composed by the following specific objectives:

-1.1 To establish the set of actors intervening in the definition of biosecurity protocols.
-1.2 To analyse the biosecurity protocols used in research laboratories, health centres specialized in infectious diseases and army units focused on biological war.
-1.3 To analyse how are used the mentioned biosecurity protocols.
-1.4 To analyse how daily practices about biological risk are conformed and acquired meaning.
-1.5 To design and to carry out a citizen panel in which experts and lay people will share their opinion about the production of knowledge on biosecurity.

-2.1. To make an inventory of the different experiences on participatory design in Spain in the field of Health technologies.
-2.2. To analyse both the different strategies followed in the participatory design experiences listed in the previous objective and their main results.
-2.3. To sketch a social network with the mentioned experiences.
-2.4. To design and to carry out a participatory process collaborating with a team of engineers in the field of Health Technologies.
-2.5. To analyse the pros and cons of a participatory design.
-2.6. To prepare suggestions and recommendations useful for teams of engineers interested in introducing participatory strategies in their processes of design.

From now, we will focus in this project, so we will be posting about it in the future. You can check all of our novelties in this blog and in our webpage: http://pobics.wix.com/pobics

Thank you so much for reading!

Photo Credit, Flickr, user Stuart