The SISCODE Interactive Guidebook is a guide for supporting co-creation in the field of Responsible Research and Innovation.
It presents methods, approaches and tools and makes available for use.
Here you can start choosing your professional profile
Below you can find out more about the scope of the interactive guidebook, co-creation and RRI.
Choose your professional profile
You can choose to enter the SISCODE Interactive Guidebook as a Practitioner or as an Organizer/Planner/Researcher.
Often these two categories are transversal and overlapping, consider your role in the specific project or the kind of material you are looking for.
Practitioner
Who directly applies co-creation in projects or initiatives from organisational to international level. Practitioners organise and work on the field in direct contact with target audiences through on-site or online activities.
Organizer / Planner / Researcher
Who plans co-creation in projects or single activities for others.
Who sets up frameworks with methods and tools to be applied by third parties in charge of executing the tasks
Introduction and scope of the SISCODE Interactive Guidebook
SISCODE (Society in Innovation and Science through CO-DEsign – siscodeproject.eu) is a three-year EU funded project within the Horizon2020 programme with 17 cross-sector partners.
It aims to explore the use of co-design to operationalize Responsible Research and Innovation, relying on:
- knowledge from the investigation of the theoretical background and existing literature,
- the analysis of existing cases in Europe and beyond, and finally
- the conduction of 10 real-life experimentations, also called Pilots.
One of the main results of SISCODE is the acknowledgement that to successfully and effectively apply co-creation, methods and objectives need to be not only made explicit, but also carefully selected in order to be appropriate to the scope, context and people. Being aware that there is still work to do in this direction, SISCODE intends to provide concrete support to those who want to apply co-creation or reflect on the use of co-creation approaches in relation to RRI.
The SISCODE Interactive Guidebook is more than a collection of contributions and findings.
Going beyond SISCODE, the guidebook reaches out to the fundamental knowledge and valuable know-hows gained by several projects and activities, and reconnects them to the SISCODE process of co-creation and its phases.
The interactive guidebook is an instrument that transforms SISCODE’s results and insights together with the findings from other initiatives investigated throughout the project into concrete support for those who want to make their initiatives and processes more responsible through co-creation. It guides the user through a general structure on how to set up a co-creation process.
The user can individually design a co-creation process by choosing the methods and tools adequate for the specific project and context.
Responsible Researchand Innovation and co-creation
In recent years, both in Europe and around the world, Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) has emerged as a paradigm for scientific and technical development.
Well-grounded principles are collaboration and synergy among actors who traditionally operate independently, including civil society, to cooperate in innovation.
RRI values indeed inclusiveness, diversity, and sustainability.
What we are witnessing is a fundamental shift in the role of citizens in Science, Technology and Innovation (STI). Citizens and diverse actors from civil society are more and more frequently engaged and involved in working in synergy for co-creating and co-producing research and innovation.
This shift, considering its potentialities and implications, requires both theoretical reflection and practical support in order to be successfully implemented.
RRI appears as a promising approach and the evidence and results from real-life situations are supporting its spread across a variety of different fields.
Especially the discourse on active public engagement for co-creating a future that is more inclusive, responsible and sustainable, became a matter of spreading interest and elaborate models for effective integration of society and co-design involving multiple stakeholders in bottom-up initiatives.
SISCODE aims not only to find a way to operationalize RRI, but to produce outputs that allow others to apply this concept in practice as well.
Co-creation is an important part of RRI. Although it has emerged just in recent years, the growing experimentation of RRI initiatives, often supported by national and international regulamentations, also demonstrates how across projects and policies the concept has gained momentum, raising high expectations.
Co-creation in RRI involves a variety of stakeholders as citizens, civil society organizations, policy makers, the research community, business and industry.
In this context, the introduction and adoption of design methodologies proved to be a valuable support for operationalizing co-creation. From brainstorming and generating ideas all the way to advanced modes of engagement, tools and approaches from the design field led the shift from traditional forms of consultation to co-designing and co-producing solutions.
Defining co-creation
Given the divergence in precisely defining co-creation, a specific characterization has been developed for the context of the SISCODE project.
Co-creation in SISCODE is defined as ‘a non-linear process that involves multiple actors and stakeholders in the ideation, implementation and assessment of products, services, policies and systems with the aim of improving their efficiency and effectiveness, and the satisfaction of those who take part in the process’ (add footnote here + ref in the end of the paragraph: Deserti, A., Eckhardt, J., Kaletka, C., Rizzo, F., & Vasche, E. (2019). CO-DESIGN FOR SOCIETY IN INNOVATION.)
Co-creation in RRI
Advanced perspectives on RRI indicate how beneficial it is to co-produce knowledge and solutions involving diverse actors who work in synergy.
Such an inclusion of multiple stakeholders in shaping solutions provides varied and complementary perspectives, consenting to further take into account uncertainty, contingency and complexity.
In this context, it is crucial to properly align the co-creation practice, its mechanisms and outcomes with societal needs, values, and expectations.
The aim is to engage citizens and end-users in creating and implementing solutions they long for and need. Hence, citizens become decision-makers who can exhibit higher levels of control.
Applying the principles of co-creation brings benefits for a wide range of stakeholders, starting from those who are directly addressed by its outcomes, to those who are in charge of regulating its implications, considering both the opportunities and barriers that could hinder the implementation. However, this needs to be accompanied and sustained by a careful selection of methodologies that takes into account the objectives of all the parties involved, and is context-aware.
These are fundamental premises in order to set a co-creation process that is appropriate to the specific objective of the initiative, the context where it takes place and the people that are being involved.
Within this framework, the SISCODE project focused on exploring how to connect the theoretical background of RRI with society. The interaction between citizens and stakeholders has been explored conducting desk and field research with 10 real-life experimentations across Europe, has been investigated and experienced, producing first-hand, valuable knowledge. TThe application of co-creation in different and varied contexts led to further elaborate evidence-based reflections on the role of the social, cultural, and regulatory environments in which they are embedded.
Through the entire process, co-creation has been applied to put the aforementioned operationalization of RRI into practice, while reconnecting it to theory.
As such, this guidebook is a collection of SISCODE’s contributions and findings, and an interactive guide that transforms SISCODE’s results and insights into an instrument of concrete support for those who want to make their initiatives and processes more responsible through co-creation. The SISCODE Interactive Guidebook provides a general structure on how to set up a co-creation process that can be individually designed by choosing the methods and tools adequate for the specific project and context.
Through the SISCODE Interactive Guidebook main results and findings on co-creation are reconnected to the RRI framework and are made available and accessible. To do that, it goes beyond SISCODE, including knowledge from other projects and activities that address co-design and co-creation both in RRI and beyond.
A series of guidebooks and toolkits has been collected and analysed to complement SISCODE’s resources towards a more holistic approach to methodologies and tools applied when integrating co-creation in RRI.
