Experimenting Design Thinking in RRI as a Model of Knowledge Exchange between Bottom-Up Initiatives and Policy Making

Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) is characterized by a different attitude towards scientific research and development processes taking in account potential impacts on the society and ecosystem previously to the actual implementation. RRI has spread as a new approach towards the design of policies, services and products including the various actors not only in the final solution but also throughout the entire development. Even this perspective has been widely discussed in theory, it is facing issues in being transformed into practice. This article discusses design thinking in RRI as an approach to stakeholder engagement aiming at operationalizing RRI while exploring its impacts. This is done by means of ten real-life experimentations within the project SISCODE funded under the Horizon 2020 programme. The experiments are conducted by 10 different innovation labs across Europe launching bottom-up initiatives to work on context-based challenges producing new forms of evidence for policy makers about the effectiveness of co-design in RRI and how co-design can contribute to shorten the distance between STI policy making and society. This potential is explored concretely to feed theoretical studies on putting RRI into practice. At the same time, it is aimed to open the practices of policy making to evidence coming from real co- design: context-based initiatives shall trigger and reinforce the learning process of policy makers to become more open to experiment with policies. This paper describes the design research for SISCODE that is mainly based on the notion of codesign experiment in real contexts as a playground for policy makers and its following application to verify the assumption that: local design projects developed in response to specific societal challenges could work as living prototypes for the policy makers to observe directly how codesign work and to take advantage from the evidence produced during these experiments to develop and better define policies. The paper reports the main results obtained during 1 (January 2019-January 2020) year of experimentation in the 10 labs with respect to the engagement of policy makers and the effectiveness of design thinking as an approach to make RRI into practice. Results discussed in the following are based on the triangulation of the data coming from a self assessment exercise conducted by the labs at the beginning of the project ( co-creation knowledge baseline) and after 1 year of development, and the data from the labs case studies as developed by project researchers.