The GoNano project is enabling co-creation between citizens, researchers, industry, civil society organisations, and policy makers across Europe to align future nanotechnologies with societal needs and values.
The Harvestore project is bringing together key actors in science and technology from across Europe with the goal of opening-up a new technology paradigm for energy harvesting and storage.
In October 2019, these two exciting European projects teamed up to explore how co-creation can be used in the design and development of autonomous wireless sensor nodes (WSN) for the future Internet of Things (IoT). IREC (The Catalonia Institute for Energy Research) and GoNano partner, RMIT, co-hosted the workshop in Barcelona, where researchers from the Harvestore project met with individuals from other research institutes and companies to work through the series of creative and reflective sessions. This workshop and the parallel workshops held in The Netherlands and The Czech Republic formed the final step in the GoNano co-creative process and built upon the outputs from the previous steps: The citizen workshops, the first stakeholder workshops, and the online public consultation.
Workshop participants discussed, debated, collaborated, and created throughout the morning; resulting in new topics of public interest being considered in the context of the Harvestore project, and suggestions of new application areas for the Harvestore project to target.
“Data privacy issues are an area not previously considered
in the scope of the project but perhaps should be.”
“We have increased the scope for potential device applications through the discussions…”
[statements from workshop participants]
The full impact of this workshop will largely be determined by the decisions made in the Harvestore project from this point forward, and initial signs are encouraging. Consideration of broader societal issues related to WSNs and IoT (e.g. availability and toxicity of materials, data management and data privacy) already began at the workshop and there were clear aspirations to engage more with all types of stakeholders. The workshop methodology may even be adopted for these future engagement activities. Such results would have a demonstrable impact on the Harvestore project and will hopefully be observed in the final phase of the GoNano project.