Bartolomeo Sapio - Böcker

Foresight has an especially important role in times of transition and trouble. In times of turbulence foresight arises as a tool for intellectual freedom and enhanced strategic leverage. But foresight itself is always in a continuing process of innovation as it is not detached from the changing environment that engulfs organisations. Taking stock from innovative developments in foresight methodologies and implementation experiences is relevant as new experiments have rapidly accumulated in this new century. Looking ahead calls for a review of new perspectives and recent practice on foresight methodology and on how foresight is embedded in organisations.This book brings together a sample of real-world cases and of conceptual proposals bridging between practitioners and researchers in the field of futures research. Such an ambition is an increasingly difficult balancing act as the gap between the needs of organisational leaders and the incentives of academics becomes an ever widening gulf due to increasingly specialised and self-absorbed agendas. To further this book’s goals we had the opportunity to assemble an international team of authors coming from a variety of backgrounds to provide their first-hand view from the frontier of new foresight empirical work and theoretical reflection.This book was originally published as a special issue of Technology Analysis and Strategic Management.

Foresight has an especially important role in times of transition and trouble. In times of turbulence foresight arises as a tool for intellectual freedom and enhanced strategic leverage. But foresight itself is always in a continuing process of innovation as it is not detached from the changing environment that engulfs organisations. Taking stock from innovative developments in foresight methodologies and implementation experiences is relevant as new experiments have rapidly accumulated in this new century. Looking ahead calls for a review of new perspectives and recent practice on foresight methodology and on how foresight is embedded in organisations.This book brings together a sample of real-world cases and of conceptual proposals bridging between practitioners and researchers in the field of futures research. Such an ambition is an increasingly difficult balancing act as the gap between the needs of organisational leaders and the incentives of academics becomes an ever widening gulf due to increasingly specialised and self-absorbed agendas. To further this book’s goals we had the opportunity to assemble an international team of authors coming from a variety of backgrounds to provide their first-hand view from the frontier of new foresight empirical work and theoretical reflection.This book was originally published as a special issue of Technology Analysis and Strategic Management.

Everyday Innovators explores the active role of people, collectively and individually, in shaping the use of information and communication technologies. It examines issues around acquiring and using that knowledge of users, how we should conceptualise the role of users and understand the forms and limitations of their participation.To what extent should we think of users as being innovative and creative?To what extent is this routine or exceptional, confined to particular group of users or part of many people’s experience of technologies?Where does the nature of the ICT or the particularities of its design impose constraints on the active role that users can play in their interaction with devices and services?Where do the horizons and orientations of the users influence or limit what they want and expect of their ICTs and how they use them?This book enables a cross-fertilisation of perspectives from different disciplines and aims to provide new insights into the role of users, drawing out both applied and theoretical implications

Foresight is an area within Futures Studies that focuses on critical thinking concerning long term developments, whether within the public sector or in industry and management, and is something of a sub-section of complexity and network science. This book examines developments in foresight methodologies and relates in its greater part to the work done in the context of the COSTA22 network of the EU on Foresight Methodologies. Foresight is a professional practice that supports significant decisions, and as such it needs to be more assured of its claims to knowledge (methodology). Foresight is practiced across many domains and is not the preserve of specialized ‘futurists’, or indeed of foresight specialists. However, the disciplines of foresight are not well articulated or disseminated across domains, leading to re-inventions and practice that does not make best use of experience in other domains. The methodological development of foresight is an important task that aims at strengthening the pool of the tools available for application, thereby empowering the actors involved in foresight practice. Elaborating further on methodological issues, such as those presented in the present book, enables the actors involved in foresight to begin to critique current practice from this perspective and, thirdly, to begin to design foresight practice. The present trends towards methodological concerns indicates a move from ‘given’ expert-predicted futures to one in which futures are nurtured through a dialogue among “stakeholders.” The book has four parts, each elaborating on a set of aspects of foresight methodologies. After an introductory section, Part II considers theorizing about foresight methodologies. Part III covers system content issues, and Part IV presents foresight tools and approaches.

Foresight is an area within Futures Studies that focuses on critical thinking concerning long term developments, whether within the public sector or in industry and management, and is something of a sub-section of complexity and network science. This book examines developments in foresight methodologies and relates in its greater part to the work done in the context of the COSTA22 network of the EU on Foresight Methodologies. Foresight is a professional practice that supports significant decisions, and as such it needs to be more assured of its claims to knowledge (methodology). Foresight is practiced across many domains and is not the preserve of specialized ‘futurists’, or indeed of foresight specialists. However, the disciplines of foresight are not well articulated or disseminated across domains, leading to re-inventions and practice that does not make best use of experience in other domains. The methodological development of foresight is an important task that aims at strengthening the pool of the tools available for application, thereby empowering the actors involved in foresight practice. Elaborating further on methodological issues, such as those presented in the present book, enables the actors involved in foresight to begin to critique current practice from this perspective and, thirdly, to begin to design foresight practice. The present trends towards methodological concerns indicates a move from ‘given’ expert-predicted futures to one in which futures are nurtured through a dialogue among “stakeholders.” The book has four parts, each elaborating on a set of aspects of foresight methodologies. After an introductory section, Part II considers theorizing about foresight methodologies. Part III covers system content issues, and Part IV presents foresight tools and approaches.

This book presents a comprehensive overview of the human dimension of social robots by discussing both transnational features and national peculiarities. Addressing several issues that explore the human side of social robots, this book investigates what a social robot is and how we might come to think about social robots in the different areas of everyday life. Organized around three sections that deal with Perceptions and Attitudes to Social Robots, Human Interaction with Social Robots, and Social Robots in Everyday Life, it explores the idea that even if the challenges of robot technologies can be overcome from a technological perspective, the question remains as to what kind of machine we want to have and use in our daily lives.Lessons learned from previous widely adopted technologies, such as smartphones, indicate that robot technologies could potentially be absorbed into the everyday lives of humans in such a way that it is the human that determines the human-machine interaction. In a similar way to how today’s information and communication technologies were initially designed for professional/industrial use, but were soon commercialized for the mass market and then personalized by humans in the course of daily practice, the use of social robots is now facing the same revolution of ‘domestication.’ In the context of this transformation, which involves the profound embedding of robots in everyday life, the ‘human’ aspect of social robots will play a major part. This book sheds new light on this highly topical issue, one of the central subjects that will be taught and studied at universities worldwide and that will be discussed widely, publicly and repeatedly in the near future.