Consulting

Organisations building and deploying new technology keep running into the same problem – resistance, backlash, and suspicion. None of these problems is the result of a lack of information. Each one relates to how people feel about emerging technologies and the institutions behind them.

I work with companies, government agencies, and universities on the emotional dimensions of public relationships with science and technology. The questions I am brought in to address are usually along these lines:

• “What do people really think and feel?”
• “Why are people reacting so emotionally, irrationally, extremely?”
• “How can we understand this backlash?”
• “How can we prevent a backlash?”

What I offer

• Responsible innovation training. Curriculum design and delivery for research teams, doctoral training centres and industry. I designed the responsible innovation component of Google DeepMind’s AI Research Foundations curriculum, and the responsible innovation elements of the AI Research Foundations Toolkit, which augments that curriculum into a university-level blended learning module that lecturers anywhere can adapt and deliver in their own contexts. I have trained researchers and professionals from technology companies, the NHS and the public sector in responsible innovation methods.
• Public engagement design. Engagement formats built to work with ambivalence and anxiety, including psychosocial methods that reach what surveys and focus groups are unable to capture.
• Anticipating public responses. Cultural analysis and insight relating to where meaning is forming around an emerging technology, the promises it is likely to inspire, and where mistrust is most likely to consolidate – before opinions harden.
• Advisory and expert input. Workshops, briefings and strategic advice on trust, hype, backlash and responsible innovation.
• Speaking. Keynotes, panels, and in-house talks and workshops.

Method

Conventional research instruments are excellent at eliciting what people can articulate and justify. However, they also miss a lot. My work uses psychosocial methods such as social dreaming, free-association interviewing, and group-based image and association work, which are designed to access the material that people cannot easily put into words but that still shapes how they act.

Selected work

• Responsible innovation lead, AI Research FoundationsFree online curriculum developed by Google DeepMind with UCL (take the course), and the AI Research Foundations Toolkit, developed by UCL and the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences with support from Google.org.
• Co-Investigator, Q-BIOMEDAn EPSRC quantum technologies research hub, leading responsible innovation and public engagement for quantum biomedical sensing. qbiomed.org
• Co-Investigator, TouchlessResponsible innovation for haptic interface development. touchlessai.eu

Working together

Engagements range from a single workshop or briefing to sustained advisory work and training programmes. Please get in touch to discuss further.