Light bulb on a beach Relocating innovation text on tracing paper

Relocating Innovation: Places and material practices of future-making

About the Project

Few words appear more frequently in contemporary public discourse than the term 'innovation'. Yet most discussions are surprisingly repetitive in their assumptions. Popular representations tend to treat innovation as the result of universally relevant acts of individual genius, while paying little attention to particular places and culturally specific practices of transformative change.

The project hopes to contribute to critical studies of innovation, through comparative analysis of three very different sites of future-making:

- Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), an internationally recognised centre of technology research and development in Silicon Valley, United States;

- small scale high-tech industry on the remote archipelago of Orkney, Scotland, a location with European significance for innovation in renewable energy and sustainable technologies.

- the Hungarian Parliament, an iconic building in the centre of Budapest that is both older and younger than liberal democracy in Central and Eastern Europe.

Our aim is to explore resemblances and differences between forms of innovation that have traditionally not been considered in juxtaposition: the design of new technologies and the creation of new political orderings. A further intersection is afforded by the role of information and communications technologies as both the objects of, and the resources for, action in these sites.

Objectives

The broad question that animates this project is the following: How do arrangements of persons and things designated as 'new' come into being? To address this question critically requires illuminating the politics of innovation, in an era where the 'new' is treated as an unquestioned good. It requires as well moving outside of familiar areas of research.

Our aim is to explore more concretely the question of how imagined futures are shaped by their location. To pursue this we develop the multiple sense of 'location' as both place, and as sociohistorical and political circumstance. This raises the following key questions:

- How do particular places become central to future-making, and others peripheral or absent?

- How are some practices and artefacts constituted as 'newer' as more 'innovative' than others?

- How is it that certain practices and artefacts are able to travel over time and across space so as to become consequential for subsequent actions in other places?

By thinking across these cases, our aim is to illuminate the politics of technological innovation on one hand, and the technological infrastructures that enable the doing of innovative politics on the other.

Download Project Outline

The full description of the project is available to download here (requires Acrobat Reader).

This is a research project based at Centre for Science Studies, Department of Sociology, Lancaster University, Lancaster LA1 4YT, United Kingdom. Funded by The Leverhulme Trust. Please contact us at relocatinginnovation@sand14.com