Papers by Gretchen Gano
Public understanding of science (Bristol, England), Jan 14, 2016
Public engagement with science and technology is now widely used in science policy and communicat... more Public engagement with science and technology is now widely used in science policy and communication. Touted as a means of enhancing democratic discussion of science and technology, analysis of public engagement with science and technology has shown that it is often weakly tied to scientific governance. In this article, we suggest that the notion of capacity building might be a way of reframing the democratic potential of public engagement with science and technology activities. Drawing on literatures from public policy and administration, we outline how public engagement with science and technology might build citizen capacity, before using the notion of capacity building to develop five principles for the design of public engagement with science and technology. We demonstrate the use of these principles through a discussion of the development and realization of the pilot for a large-scale public engagement with science and technology activity, the Futurescape City Tours, which was...
Futures
Increasingly, decision makers seek to harness “big data” to guide choices in management and polic... more Increasingly, decision makers seek to harness “big data” to guide choices in management and policy settings as well as in professions that manufacture, build, and innovate. Scholars examining this trend tend to diagnose it at once as techno positivist in its insistence on design yoked to quantifiable variables and computational modeling and, alternatively, as an imperative integral to realizing ecologically sustainable innovation. This article investigates this tension. It reflects on the role of futurists, designers, architects, urban planners, social scientists, and artists in interpreting and utilizing comprehensiveness as a design frame. Among nine experimental foresight workshops at the inaugural Emerge conference at Arizona State University, many focused on producing physical objects or media, one modeled and expanded upon a method pioneered by architect and polymath, R. Buckminster Fuller. At a time when many of the capabilities to realize Fuller's specifications for big data have matured, I investigate whether comprehensive design as framed by Fuller's method shows promise as a trend enabling ecologically sustainable innovations. A historical look at Fuller's Design Science and the reflection on it in the Emerge workshop marks an opportunity to highlight and interpret the resurgence of comprehensive thinking in design while navigating the contradictions this orientation engenders.
AIAA SPACE 2014 Conference and Exposition, 2015
Structured citizen deliberation has been promoted as an integral component of technology assessme... more Structured citizen deliberation has been promoted as an integral component of technology assessment, but scholars should also consider whether citizens’ value their participation in organised deliberations. We investigated whether Americans who had participated in structured deliberation about emerging technologies thought their experiences should be emulated and institutionalised to address the societal impact of new technologies. In this unique study, we interviewed participants nearly two years after the event rather than immediately post-process. They were also asked to explain their opinions using an open- ended survey format, which generated a qualitatively rich dataset. Nearly all respondents recommended future consensus conferences, and their reasoning echoed scholarly distinctions between public understanding of science (PUS) and public engagement with science (PES). Our paper concludes with a discussion about whether we can generalise from our results beyond the NCTF or the American political context.
Journal of Public Administration Research …, 2007
Edited Volumes by Gretchen Gano
In Rask, Mikko and Richard Worthington, eds. Governing Biodiversity through Democratic Deliberation.
Participatory Visual and Digital Research in Action. Edited by Aline Gubrium, Krista Harper, and Marty Otañez
Book Reviews by Gretchen Gano
Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, 2013
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Papers by Gretchen Gano
Edited Volumes by Gretchen Gano
Book Reviews by Gretchen Gano