Planning: CRISES: Center for Socio-Technological Transformation

Today’s societies face multiple, often overlapping and reinforcing social, economic, and environmental challenges. Technology and technological systems unfortunately contribute to many of these challenges, including risk, inequality, and insecurity. Energy is an important example.

Energy technologies and systems provide essential human services (e.g., mobility, electric power, security, heating and cooling). At the same time, they are increasingly at risk due to extreme weather and cybersecurity risks. They contribute to climate change and air pollution.

And they pose costly financial burdens for low-income households and communities that have the potential to perpetuate and exacerbate poverty. It is important, therefore, to find new ways to design and orchestrate human relationships with technology and infrastructure that support and strengthen, rather than undermine, families and communities.

This study investigates how to advance innovation in technology and technological systems that supports and enhances human wellbeing and security. The goal is to significantly improve understanding of socio-technological systems, defined as how technology is integrated into society, in the present and in the future. The project carries out planning of research to analyze how current socio-technological systems contribute to risk, inequality, and insecurity.

It develops approaches to envisioning and designing future socio-technological systems that strengthen families and communities. And it explores how to bring about change from today’s existing socio-technological systems to better future alternatives. The project uses research methods that foster interdisciplinary synthesis and convergence to create use-inspired and useful knowledge for societal partners.

These methods draw together researchers from the social and economic sciences and engineering, as well as community, government, and industry leaders, in a process of collaborative research design. The project also carries out planning of associated educational, training, community engagement, and other initiatives to accompany the research as part of a comprehensive research center design.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.