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Relocating Innovation: Places and material practices of future-making
Summary: This project starts from the observation that current discourses on 'innovation' are surprisingly repetitive in their assumptions. Popular representations tend to treat innovation as the result of universally relevant acts of individual genius, while paying little attention to particular places and culturally specific practices of transformative change. This project contributes to critical studies of innovation, through comparative analysis of three different sites of social, technological and political future making: Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), an internationally recognised centre of technology research and development in Silicon Valley, United States; small-scale high-tech industry on the remote archipelago of Orkney, Scotland, a location with European significance for innovation in renewable energy and sustainable technologies; diverse spaces of political action of the past 30 years in Hungary (this research will be carried out by Endre Dányi as his doctoral project). Our aim is to explore resemblances and differences between forms of innovation that have traditionally not been considered in juxtaposition: the design of new technologies and the creation of new political orderings. A further intersection is afforded by the role of information and communications technologies as both the objects of, and the resources for, action in these sites.
Key Facts
Website: http://www.sand14.com/relocatinginnovation/
Funder: Leverhulme Trust
Type of Activity: Academic Research - Externally Funded
Principal Investigator: Lucy Suchman
Research Associate: Laura Watts (Sociology)
Dept/Research Groups: Centre for Science Studies, Sociology
Keywords: Science and technology studies, Innovation, Ethnography
Purpose of Research
Academic Research - Externally Funded
Project Funder
Leverhulme Trust
Associated News Stories
Futures Handbook: Arts and Social Science Collaboration Published
Date: 23 September 2009
A new collection of imagined futures for the islands of Orkney, Scotland, has just be ... Read more»
Innovation at the edge: Lancaster social researchers collaborating with arts and industry in Orkney
Date: 22 September 2009
Lancaster University researchers will be collaborating with arts, industry and local government representatives from Orkney, Scotland, this week in ... Read more»
Associated Events
Relocating Innovation Roundtable
Date: 17 June 2008 Time: 14:00 - 16:00
A sharing of ideas between people and projects working on place, materials, and innovation. This is an informal gathering from across the faculties, t ... Read more»
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