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Technology plays a complicated role in the lives of many disabled people. On the one hand, technologies can help mitigate some of the challenges that disabled people face in their daily lives. Wheelchairs, braille computer displays, augmentative and alternative communication technologies, and many other technological artefacts can enable vital access to physical and social spaces.

On the other hand, many of these innovations fail to support the people for which they are purportedly intended; Technologies that are designed (and marketed) for disabled people are often developed without serious input from disabled communities. As a result, they may reflect ableist assumptions about what well-functioning bodies and minds presumably ought to look like.

For instance, voices from the critical disability community have expressed concerns that exoskeletons and cochlear implants implicitly devalue lives lived in wheelchairs and deaf culture. Another example is that communication technologies may reflect neurotypical communication norms and exclude the communication styles and preferences of autistic and other neurodivergent users.

It is thus important to investigate and reflect on ableist assumptions in contexts of technology development and implementation and to develop inclusive alternatives. Several research projects in our department are focused on furthering these aims:

1. The COMET project looks at best practices for engineering ethics education. It has examined how to incorporate disability studies into Responsible Innovation practices. It has also developed a pedagogy that accommodates the skills and preferences of neurodivergent students, while also reflecting on ableism in technology design.
2. Caroline Bollen has written about empathy, autism, and (augmentative and alternative) communication technology. She shows how scientific research on empathy fails to do justice to the empathic experiences of autistic people and how communication technology can be designed in ways that value (neuro)diversity.

Animated video by Caroline Bollen about her research on empathy

3. VTI researchers contribute to the project ‘According to What Order is this a Disorder?’, part of the TU Delft Institute for Health Systems Science. It critically examines normative assumptions underlying categories of mental illness and disorder.  
4. In her NWO-Veni project, Janna van Grunsven is combining insights from the field of embodied cognition and critical disability studies to develop a more inclusive conception of what it means to flourish as an embodied, expressive, interaction-worthy person situated in a world shaped by technology.
5. Sabine Roeser & Janna van Grunsven argue that design for emotions and enactive embodied cognitive science can contribute to neurodiversity-embracing communication technology.
6. Janna van Grunsven has also reflected on how designers can circumvent ableism and promote accessibility through their practices.

We are now at the beginning of a new era of technological innovation; New generations of the technologies that have emerged since the second world war are converging and undergoing widespread integration. This makes whole new fields possible, including artificial intelligence, robotics, synthetic biology, nanomedicine, next-generation genomics, neurotechnology and geo-engineering. These are socially disruptive technologies (SDTs) that have the potential to radically alter everyday life, cultural practices and social and economic institutions.

Societal disruption may well be necessary and desirable for responding to pressing global problems such as climate change and depletion of natural resources. But the technologies also raise tough moral questions and are in need of ethical evaluation. A complication in such evaluations is that these technologies may also affect the basic concepts and values that we normally appeal to in our ethical thinking, such as:

• the concepts that underlie our moral self-understanding, such as (moral) agency, autonomy, human interdependence, and responsibility;
• the concepts that form the basis of our political, social and legal institutions, such as democracy, justice, and equality;
• the basic ontological categories that we use to order our world, such as the distinctions between natural and artificial, humans and machines, public and private, and agents and physical systems.

In the ESDiT research program, we take up the challenge that socially disruptive technologies pose to our core concepts, in collaboration with colleagues from other Dutch universities.

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Debates about risky technologies often result in conflicts and stalemates between experts and laypeople. Examples of technologies that give rise to fruitless, heated debates about risk are Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS), shale gas, nanotechnology, genetic modification and nuclear energy. Such technologies can trigger a range of different emotions, including fear and indignation.

How should deal with such emotions in political decision making about risky technologies? Engineers and policy makers often see emotions as contrary to rational decision making. They are either ignored or taken as ‘necessary evils’ that have to be respected in a democratic society.

Grounded in philosophical theories about the nature of emotions, the Emotional Deliberation Approach developed at the VTI department takes a different view; It considers emotions to be possible indicators of underlying ethical concerns. Anger may for example be the result of concerns about justice. The Emotional Deliberation Approach provides recommendations for productively engaging with emotions as an integral part of participatory public debates about risky technologies.

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Frugal innovations take circumstances of extreme resource constraint as a point of departure and offer simple, smart and affordable solutions, especially to underprivileged communities and sections of society. To be successful for both suppliers and demanders, frugal innovations need to fit local circumstances and cultures.

Frugal innovators can be individuals or local communities engaged in grassroot innovations to solve their own immediate problems, NGOs and social enterprises developing frugal innovations like apps for refugees, or commercial firms developing frugal innovations to penetrate so-called ‘Base of the Pyramid’ markets.

Successful frugal technologies and innovations are increasingly co-produced in so-called polycentric networks of innovation that link several stakeholders to each other such as entrepreneurs, designers, financiers, manufacturers and distributors from various parts of the globe.

Together with our colleagues at Leiden University and the Erasmus University Rotterdam, we investigate whether and under what circumstances frugal innovations can contribute to sustainable and inclusive development. The challenge is how to do that without sacrificing user value. An example is a project on inclusive business models for frugal innovations in Africa that we did a few years back.

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The 5 types of value change that were identified by our Value Change project

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Ibo van de Poel about different approaches to deal with conflicting values

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Ibo van de Poel explaining the value hierarchy method

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Doorn, N. (2019). Water Ethics: An Introduction. Rowman & Littlefield.

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