Erik Fisher is an associate professor at the School for the Future of Innovation in Society at Arizona State University and spends the fall semester 2018 in Karlsruhe working with colleagues at ITAS and ITZ. He is a leader in the field of socio-technical integration, a field that he has founded and brought to international academic recognition, followed by considerable research and policy uptake. At KIT, Fisher was leading a series of introductory workshops on the Socio-Technical Integration Research (STIR) approach and participated in various workshops, among others in a workshop on Socio-Technical Integration organized by Alexandra Hausstein (program).
At Arizona State University Fisher directs the STIR Cities project, which studies and compares diverse organizations in Phoenix, Arizona and Portland, Oregon working on smart grid technologies. Supported by a National Science Foundation grant, the project develops the notion of local and regional sociotechnical imaginaries and brings social science engagement out of the laboratory and into the (smart) city. Fisher is editor-in-chief of the Journal of Responsible Innovation. Formerly, he served as director of the STIR project and of a PhD program in Human and Social Dimensions of Science and Technology, as well as associate director of the Center for Nanotechnology in Society at ASU.
In this interview with Joshua Bayless, Erik Fisher describes STIR as a method to investigate the possibility and utility of incorporating social and ethical considerations directly into scientific research and technology development.
