Collaboration on Convergent Technologies: Trading zones, Interactional Expertise and Moral Imagination

Wednesday, March 18, 2009
4:00 - 5:00 PM
Room 190, Holden Hall

Professor Michael Gorman
Professor of Science, Technology and Society, University of Virginia

Convergent technologies (bio, nano, info and cognitive) require interdisciplinary collaboration on an unprecedented scale, because the collaborations are not only across science and engineering disciplines, but will also involve ethicists, social scientists and policy-makers. The goal of convergent technologies is to enhance human performance, which leads to the possibility of real value conflicts at the earliest stages of discovery and development; hence, the need for involving a wide range of stakeholders early. This talk will describe a framework for achieving this kind of collaboration across wide expertise and cultural gulfs (what Kuhn called paradigms). One good method is to establish a trading zone among the key stakeholders, leading to development of a creole, or reduced common language. These trading zones can be facilitated by interactional experts who act as trade agents by understanding the language and assumptions of more than one disciplinary community in the zone. Moral imagination will be necessary to deal with values conflicts. Several attempts to create small nanotechnology trading zones among scientists, engineers, humanists and/or social scientists will be discussed. New educational designs will be required to prepare students for a world where emergent socio-technological systems require collaborative development. If time permits, the talk will conclude with a description of Nanosim, an interactive, classroom simulation of the National Nanotechnology Initiative; the goal is to prepare engineering students to work both within and across teams in an environment where policy and technical decisions are intertwined.

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