ABOUT

Aim

The Innovation for Science, Life, and Ethics (ISLE) project explores challenging ways to foster creative connections between emerging biomedical technologies and society. To this end, we conduct interdisciplinary and international research, in collaboration with artists, designers, journalists, and policy makers.

Supported by Research Institute of Science and Technology for Society (RISTEX), Japan Science and Technology Agency (JST)

Specific Activities

1. Workshops on ISLEs
We aim to design exploratory workshops on three islands, namely Teshima (Kagawa), Sakushima (Aichi), and Sadogashima (Niigata) in Japan, which are famous for their artwork and art festivals. Our workshops are based on the combination of our original artwork and a visual critical-thinking method. An important workshop objective is to think together to collect and clarify people’s voices on emerging technologies for policymaking.

2. Reframing Ethical, Legal and Policy Issues
Technologies to modify and design the genome information of organisms have the potential to cause long-term, irreversible effects on entire living systems, where the boundaries between the natural and artificial are increasingly blurred. To formulate regulations on these technologies for the coming future, we try to reconceptualise human values and relationships within our living environments, based on past international and national ethical and legal regulations.

3. Exploring New Social Methods
Whilst public questionnaire surveys have provided ample evidence for policy making, there are potential limitations to these surveys, such as passive involvement of respondents and unclear responses. To address these issues, we propose a novel approach to public surveys for enhancing respondent engagement, and for demonstrating their ambiguous or ambivalent behaviours towards these emerging technologies.

4. Co-designing Public Engagement Funding Programs
Through research programmes, many public funding agencies across the globe appreciate the arts and humanities sectors as having a key role in public engagement with science. However, we may be able to better develop the practices of these programmes using more organised and strategic methods. Drawing lessons from several successful practices around the world, we suggest a basis in co-designing novel inter- and trans-disciplinary public engagement programmes.

We believe that ISLE project is not only the reverse idea of ELSI (Ethical, Legal and Social Implications), but that it also offers great opportunities for the integration of the cultures of science, technology and the arts with the public.