Celebrating the achievements of the £33M UKRI Trustworthy Autonomous Systems Programme

Getting Started with RRI

Briefly…

The EPSRC AREA framework highlights four key activities involved in “doing” RRI:

  • Anticipate possible outcomes of research and innovation (including unintended ones),
  • Reflect on motivations, processes and products,
  • Engage with relevant stakeholders, and
  • Act accordingly to address issues revealed.

 

There are LOTS of different tools and resources available to help with RRI (see below). Sometimes the biggest problem is deciding where to start. The RRI Prompts and Practice cards provide a simple starting point if you want to start thinking about what RRI could mean for your research.
 

But fundamentally, RRI is an ongoing process in which you ask yourself (and your colleagues):

What are we going to do now to make our research ‘more responsible’?

 

Next: Using cards in RRI or RRI for New Proposals

 

In more detail…

Here are some more specific questions to consider in relation to RRI:

  • What actions do you need or want to take?
  • What do you need to find out more about?
  • How could you adapt the activities you already have planned to incorporate things we have discussed today?
  • What barriers or difficulties might there be? How could you overcome them?
  • Could elements of RRI become part of your research, i.e. something you publish?
  • What thought or idea are you going to take away to apply elsewhere?

 

Here are some links to useful tools and resources to help with RRI:

 

As a researcher, you can do a lot to make your research responsible, but there are some things that you can’t do as a lone researcher. RRI will be most effective if:

  • The Project specifically allocates time and resources for RRI
  • The Research Group or Centre provides support for RRI, for example in proposal development
  • The Research Organisation supports and values RRI, for example in promotion
  • External bodies such as Funders are seen to value RRI – which UKRI do!

 
So you may need to ask other people for support, and perhaps you could act as a local “champion” for RRI.
 

For more information…

Marina Jirotka, Barbara Grimpe, Bernd Stahl, Grace Eden, and Mark Hartswood. 2017. Responsible research and innovation in the digital age. Commun. ACM 60, 5 (May 2017), 62–68. https://doi.org/10.1145/3064940
 

Virginia Portillo, Peter Craigon, Liz Dowthwaite, Chris Greenhalgh, Elvira Pérez-Vallejos (2022). Supporting responsible research and innovation within a university-based digital research programme: Reflections from the “hoRRIzon” project. Journal of Responsible Technology, Volume 12, 100045, ISSN 2666-6596. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrt.2022.100045