Best practice: The Critic
You are a journalist, or a worried citizen, or just an interested user. Maybe you are a member of the local council. You want to be able to structurally think about the impact of technology or your relation with technology. You want to be able to discuss the impact of technology in depth and/or ask critical questions.
Example User Story: ‘As a (student) journalist I want to write an article about smart street lights. I want to know which questions to ask to the contractor, the civil servants and the local council.’
Time period: Depending on the goal one hour to a few weeks.
Target audience: Journalists (students), local council, critical citizens, critical users of technology that want to know more, managers. Every person with the ambition to structure their thinking about the impact of technology.
The Best Practice
The fastest way to assess a technology is perform a Quick Scan. The Quick Scan is then best discussed after which you can decide to fill out the most relevant categories from the Full Scan. This helps to structure a critical way of thinking about a certain technology.
It is also possible to just use the questions from the Quick Scan or Full Scan to structure a questionnaire or a debate on a certain technology. If you are a (student) journalist you can use the questions to find out if the technology is well-thought-out (expert interview). As a potential user, you can get a deeper insight into the arguments for using the technology or not. As a member of a local council you can ask unanswered questions to the policy makers.
We also found it to be very productive to use the Technology Impact Cycle Tool to find out what you would improve on a certain technology. You can use the Improvement Scan, to get an overview on the most important improvements.
Finally, from November 2020, the crash courses will be available. These crash courses are very helpful if you want a group of students, local council, policy makers, managers, and so on to be more aware of the impact of technology and therefore the impact of the decisions they make. Stimulating people to do the crash courses and organizing workshops to discuss the results using the widely available examples in the Technology Impact Cycle Tool, is a very effective way to increase the level of reflection on technology.
Reference examples: In the Technology Impact Cycle Tool there are some examples cases like ‘Re.Inc. The Griefbot,’ ‘The Corona Contact App,’ ’Baby Don’t Cry,’ and ‘Rekening Rijden Luxemburg (G3),’ that can be downloaded as PDF. The PDF already provides a very solid base, as you will see, for an article, critical questions or a policy document.
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