Working towards Social and Economic impact awareness

In June interested NCCR researchers participated in a workshop on Socio-Economic Impact of Digital Fabrication, aimed to help members from all levels of the NCCR to asses the social and economic implications of their work and to develop a use case for their technology.

The discussion with researchers revealed several main challenges to assessing impact, namely; determining the appropriate scope of an assessment, how to extrapolate impacts from prototypes, identifying appropriate measures, and the need to agree on benchmarks for the impacts of digital fabrication.

The workshop aimed to deepen our understanding of assessing impact, help researchers take first steps to develop a use case for their research to spot both potentially positive and negative impacts and to more consciously position and direct their research.

As a follow up workshop leaders and NCCR researchers will develop assessment criteria for digital fabrication and example use cases.

Have a use case you could share with our researchers? Want to join the conversation? Please get in contact with Kaitlin McNally at mcnally@dfab.ch.