Abstract

Socio-technical futures like visions or scenarios, that is the more or less systematic imagination of the interplay of future technologies with future society, have played an important role in Science and Technology Studies und Technology Assessment for decades. For a long time, the debates on and the analysis of these socio-technical futures have focused on the plausibility and legitimacy of these futures as anticipations, both on the technical and on the societal side. Only recently, the focus has shifted to investigating how socio-technical images of the future influence the present, that is, how they contribute to present processes of policymaking, societal debate and technology development, equally. This volume presents papers that focus on the question how socio-technical images of the future shape present processes of innovation and transformation.