Value Sensitive Design and Responsible Innovation

The Netherlands has learned interesting lessons about ethics and innovation in the first decade of the twenty-first century. A real innovative design for an electronic patient record system or a truly smart electricity meter, would have anticipated or pre-empted moral concerns and accommodated them into its design, reconciling efficiency, privacy, sustainability, and safety. Innovation can take the shape of design solutions to situations of moral overload. Responsible innovation aims at changing the world in such a way that the pursuit of one horn of the dilemma is no longer necessarily at the expense of grabbing the other. It aims at grabbing the bull by both horns. Responsible innovation should, therefore, be distinguished from mere innovation or the adding of mere new functionality. Responsible innovation is the endeavor of attempting to add morally relevant functionality which allows us to do more good than before.