Responsible Innovation Prompts and Practice Cards

The Responsible Innovation (RI) prompts and practice cards give a high level introduction to Responsible Innovation.

They are intended to be a starting point to help engage with RI in relation to a project or piece of work. They do this by representing elements of the AREA 4P RI framework as cards allowing people to engage and reflect on RRI in relation to their work.

Considerations of responsibility are becoming more prominent and important, but it may be new or unfamiliar to people. They therefore need and introductory way to help in understanding and engaging with it in relation to their work.

To help with this the RI prompts and practice cards introduce RI through 20 main cards, each representing a element of the AREA 4P framework (1 introduction and 4 cards for each of the AREA elements). Each card contains a series of questions as ‘Prompts’ and suggested actions as ‘Practice’ to help them begin to consider RI in relation to their work. They are supported by a series of suggested activities and we encourage people to come up with their own.

The RI Prompts and Practice cards were developed as part of the HoRRIzon project.

Those involved included Chris Greenhalgh, Virginia Portillo, Peter Craigon, Liz Dowthwaite, Elvira Perez Vallejos, Helena Webb, Hanne Wagner, Bernd Stahl and Carolyn Ten Holter, with funding from Horizon (UKRI grant EP/T022493/1) and the Trustworthy Autonomous Systems Hub (UKRI grant EP/V00784X/1).

There development is described in: Virginia Portillo, Chris Greenhalgh, Peter J. Craigon, and Carolyn Ten Holter. 2023. Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) Prompts and Practice Cards: a Tool to Support Responsible Practice. In Proceedings of the First International Symposium on Trustworthy Autonomous Systems (TAS ‘23). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 57, 1–4. https://doi.org/10.1145/3597512.3599721

The set comprises 34 cards, 20 cards from the AREA-4P framework 8 Instruction cards 5 ‘can you agree’ cards and one ‘blank’ card.

The 20 ‘main’ cards are divided into 4 sets of 5 cards across the intersection of themes from the framework of AREA – Anticipate, Reflect, Engage and Act and the 4 ‘P’s of purpose, product, process and people. Each set has an introductory card and 4 prompts and practice cards. The white instruction cards provide wider context and suggested ways of using them and the black ‘can you agree’ cards provide a series or prompts to help prioritise and structure discussion and use.

Each main card has the same structure with Prompts followed by suggested Practice.

The Colour of the card represents the theme of the card (Anticipate, Reflect, Engage, Act).

Each card has a title to summarise the combined theme of the card.
The top half of the card provides a series of example questions as prompts under this theme.
The bottom half of the card provides a set of example actions related to the theme.

The bottom of the card shows how the elements of the AREA 4P framework intersect as represented by this card. In this case the card Unintended Consequences is part of the ‘Reflect’ element of the AREA framework and ‘Product’ category of the 4 ’P’s, as labelled on the bottom of the card.

Cards can be used by individuals or groups and in very quick and longer sessions. Come up with your own.

The white instruction cards illustrate how to use the cards to:

Explore the cards
Plan a project
Explore different points of view with a group or project

There are also brief introductions to Responsible Innovation, lists of stakeholders to consider and credits.

The cards have been used in formal and informal contexts across teaching and research settings, with researchers, stakeholders and the public.

Examples include the Horizon Centre for Doctoral Training at the University of Nottingham and the UKRI-funded Horizon, the Trustworthy Autonomous Systems Hub and Responsible AI-UK, where the cards have been used for:

RRI training for research students and researchers,
Helping to plan RRI activities for new proposals, and
RI support embedded within current projects.

The cards can be accessed as physical sets, online and remotely via the Cardographer app and using the Online whiteboard Miro

See the links below.

A PDF of the RI Prompts and Practice Cards can be downloaded from the University of Nottingham

Different PDF versions of the cards are available depending on for example if you want to print the cards yourself or get them professionally printed. They can be found via the links on the buttons to the right/below.

PDF

Other PDFs

A Miro board with the RI prompts and Practice cards allows online remote and distributed use of the cards

We have found the online whiteboard Miro a useful tool to enable card exercises to be conducted online. A board with the cards and example resources laid out can be viewed at the link to the right/below and can be duplicated into your own Miro account for you to adapt and use for your own purposes.

Miro Board

To allow you to browse and access the cards online they can be accessed via the web on the Cardographer app.

This was designed to make cards available more widely online for those without a physical set.

It has been designed to be used on a mobile phone but can also be used via a web browser. You can find the cards at the Link or by scanning the QR code to the right/below.

RI Prompts and Practice Cards on Cardographer

Physical card sets for face to face sessions may be available please get in touch if you are interested.

This will be subject to availability and at cost.

Or you can arrange to print them yourself from the PDFs.

The cards are Creative Commons CC-BY

RI Prompts and Practice Cards by the University of Nottingham (2023) are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.

Please cite: Virginia Portillo, Chris Greenhalgh, Peter J. Craigon, and Carolyn Ten Holter. 2023. Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) Prompts and Practice Cards: a Tool to Support Responsible Practice. In Proceedings of the First International Symposium on Trustworthy Autonomous Systems (TAS ’23). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 57, 1–4. https://doi.org/10.1145/3597512.3599721

Or for the cards themselves: Chris Greenhalgh, Peter Craigon, Virginia Portillo, Liz Dowthwaite, Elvira Perez Vallejos, Helena Webb, Hanne Gesine Wagner, Bernd Carsten Stahl, Carolyn Ten Holter. 2023. Responsible Innovation (RI) Prompts and Practice Cards (version 3.1.1, November 2023). http://doi.org/10.17639/nott.7353