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This response reflects upon the issues brought up by the Discussion Paper with regard to the loss of RRI funding in Horizon Europe, and what that might mean for early career scholars in our community and our field. As a knowledge project aimed at institutional change, one could argue that RRI is still incomplete and we must now anticipate a threat to that completion. However, that should not stop us from also anticipating the possibilities of an R(R)I whose future is ours as a community to determine.

Disabled people are often involved in robotics research as potential users of technologies which address specific needs. However, their more generalised lived expertise is not usually included when planning the overall design trajectory of robots for health and social care purposes. This risks losing valuable insight into the lived experience of disabled people, and impinges on their right to be involved in the shaping of their future care. This project draws upon the expertise of an interdisciplinary team to explore methodologies for involving people with disabilities in the early design of care robots in a way that enables incorporation of their broader values, experiences and expectations. We developed a comparative set of focus group workshops using Community Philosophy, LEGO® Serious Play® and Design Thinking to explore how people with a range of different physical impairments used these techniques to envision a “useful robot”. The outputs were then workshopped with a group of roboticists and designers to explore how they interacted with the thematic map produced. Through this process, we aimed to understand how people living with disability think robots might improve their lives and consider new ways of bringing the fullness of lived experience into earlier stages of robot design. Secondary aims were to assess whether and how co-creative methodologies might produce actionable information for designers (or why not), and to deepen the exchange of social scientific and technical knowledge about feasible trajectories for robotics in health-social care. Our analysis indicated that using these methods in a sequential process of workshops with disabled people and incorporating engineers and other stakeholders at the Design Thinking stage could potentially produce technologically actionable results to inform follow-on proposals.

Book review.

The concepts of risk and responsibility are often linked to discussions of emerging scientific fields, but studies into how these concepts are connected to research practices have been narrowly focused on risks for humans and the environment. To broaden these concepts, “Responsible Research and Innovation” (RRI), a democratic governance framework, aims to enable societal discussions beyond traditional risk assessment and mitigation. Proponents of RRI argue that these discussions should not be confined to the direct risks of the research itself, but also include wider issues, such as “the purposes and motivations of research” [1]. Yet, it is not only RRI protagonists who want to broaden this conversation. We found that scientists also ponder non‐technical risks, such as the impact of institutional demands on career, health and social relationships, or economic pressures from the incentive system in which much of research in biology is now embedded. These findings challenge the present formulation of RRI as a science governance framework and lead us to argue that “responsible” research and innovation systems can only succeed if these broader concerns are taken as seriously as the risk of laboratory accident or inadvertent release.

Over the past decade, the need for greater diversity and inclusion across research systems has received greater emphasis from policymakers, funders, universities and stakeholders. Strategies in support of diversity and inclusion need to be underpinned by the best available evidence. This short briefing paper is a summary of a larger review carried out by a multidisciplinary team from University of Sheffield of the relationship between a diverse and inclusive biomedical and health research community, and the qualities and impacts of its research.

On 11 March, 2011 a magnitude 9.0 earthquake struck off the North-eastern coast of the Japanese main island of Honshu. Although reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant shut down as expected, the 15m tsunami which followed caused a loss of power which disrupted the cooling systems. Over the next few days, four of the six reactors experienced catastrophic events, requiring the evacuation of plant personnel and residents of nearby villages in a 20km radius. Nuclear contamination has continued to hinder clean-up and reconstruction efforts in Fukushima prefecture, one of the three worst hit by the tsunami, and it is estimated that the plant itself could take up to 40 years to decommission. Moreover, subsequent investigations have revealed serious systemic issues in the regulation of nuclear power and in the mechanisms for provision of scientific advice to the public, policymakers, and to disaster response personnel, which has contributed to a considerable loss of public trust in both scientists and the Japanese government. Handling of the ‘triple disaster’, therefore, raises important questions for understanding the scale and extent of nuclear contamination after accidental release, but also about the need for realistic emergency planning and for consistency, accuracy and trust in the dissemination of useful information, not only during an unfolding disaster and immediate recovery period, but often for years, even decades, to come.

The proponents of responsible innovation (RI) have often opened their discussions with the\ud reassurance that while they are against irresponsible innovation, they are not advocating\ud irresponsible stagnation. In the two-by-two matrix generally used to illustrate this model of\ud innovation, the quadrant for responsible stagnation has so far gone largely unmentioned, let\ud alone explored. This paper draws on existing real-world cases to examine what arguments\ud drawn from ecological economics might contribute to the discussion of RI. It questions the\ud present growth-driven paradigm, and asks whether opening the black box of 'Responsible\ud Stagnation' might also open the door for a reasoned discussion about resource consumption\ud and pace of development in over-productive or too-risky sectors and technologies, as an\ud intrinsic part of responsible innovation, rather than its opposite.