Science fiction narratives can provide unique affordances for technology assessment (TA), producing more robust evaluations of the effects of technological change by foregrounding human factors, cultural complexities, diverse perspectives, and otherwise unforeseen and emergent consequences (Merrie et al. 2018; Marshall et al. 2023; Mills and Whittle 2025; see also the notion of “thick descriptions” of futures in Fischer and Mehnert 2021, p. 28). Since our establishment in 2012, the Center for Science and the Imagination at Arizona State University (CSI) has undertaken projects that bring together fiction authors and visual artists with experts in diverse fields – from the sciences and engineering to the humanities, public policy, and science and technology studies – to create images of the future for a variety of sociotechnical arenas, including energy systems, space exploration, and climate change. In these projects, fiction authors, artists, and subject area experts work in small teams, starting with an in-person workshop (or, occasionally, a structured set of virtual engagements), to collaboratively generate stories, artworks, and essays that consider the consequences of technological choices and policies, grapple with the opportunities and drawbacks of technological change, and trace pathways from today to many tomorrows. The resulting works are collected in multimodal books, which we make available open-access in several digital formats (PDF, EPUB, MOBI, HTML), and sometimes in print.

We will draw on three of these projects, all supported by federal entities in the United States and published between 2017 and 2025, to identify seven unique features of our science fictional approach to TA. Taken together, these affordances characterize how infusing TA with science fiction narrative can generate aesthetically rich considerations of the social, cultural, and political impacts of technological change.

The seven features are: 1) insisting on polyvocality; 2) approaching the future as a design space; 3) emphasizing unforeseen and emergent consequences of technological change; 4) using character-driven storytelling to introduce psychological and emotional registers of meaning-making and motivation; 5) constructing texts that are designed to invite active interpretation and catalyze conversations; 6) centering marginalized, unexpected, and challenging perspectives; and 7) representing social and technical issues as entangled.

Our approach to using science fiction as a tool for technology assessment positions these interventions as works of ‘applied imagination’, blending informed speculation with careful analysis and collaborative deliberation to encourage intellectually ambitious, ethically meticulous conversations about technological change from processes of research and development to regulation, policy design, and implementation. This approach can provide compelling images of the future that invite broad participation in TA (Gordon 2009; Berne and Schummer 2005), and that explore a larger possibility space for configurations of technology and society.

Our approach to using science fiction as a tool for technology assessment positions these interventions as works of ‘applied imagination’.

This research article is not intended to quantitatively or qualitatively assess the effectiveness of our approach from a social science perspective. The book projects we present here are better understood as works of cultural production oriented towards futures and TA than as research instruments. Our style of working with authors and other contributors on these and other projects like them is fluid and intersubjective; the process by which these narrative images of the future were conceptualized, refined, and edited vary not just across projects but within each project, based on the needs and working style of each contributor. As such, our aim in this article is to report out on our own approach to using science fiction as a mode for generating images of the future, and to share our understanding about what makes that approach distinctive and effective.

In writing and revising this piece, we have spent time reflecting on features that characterize an approach which, as we describe below, has been built up inductively and iteratively through a number of socially intensive collaborative projects – each of which involved working with well over a dozen contributors and collaborators. We aim here to adopt a reflective and interpretive stance towards our own work, but in the ensuing discussion, we do not strive to achieve a disinterested or critically distanced attitude, or to present claims about specific impacts on readers, or efficacy in shaping policy outcomes, or other outcomes that would require systematic data gathering and analysis. Rather, we will draw on our deep immersion in our own processes, and our in-depth knowledge of the written artifacts created through those processes, to suggest how the approach we have honed may be useful for other TA practitioners and contexts.

Science fiction is a valuable tool for TA because it supports the development of people-centric narratives that address complex, non-linear interactions across multiple technologies and societal domains (Miller and Bennett 2008). These narratives are not predictive but rather provocative, inspiring inclusive debate and deliberation that can encompass many different forms of expertise as well as public participation. Speculative narratives and participatory practices such as future design invite audiences to think and feel their way through an image of the future, encouraging empathy, and connection with future generations (Galang et al. 2025; Saijo 2020). These efforts can build a sense of efficacy and engagement in debates about emerging technologies, fostering the development of collaborative imagination (Finn and Wylie 2021). In the context of TA, these approaches support futures consciousness and futures literacy (Ahvenharju et al. 2018; Miller 2007), providing additional critical tools for navigating decisions.

Hermeneutic TA represents a logical extension of this work to understand the future as a cultural space, an idea that can only be discussed and interpreted in the context of the present (Grunwald 2014; Nordmann and Grunwald 2023); or, in more literary terms, it understands that the future is a fiction continually fabricated in the present. These sociotechnical imaginaries are windows into our hopes and fears regarding the future (Jasanoff and Kim 2015); they have also been deployed as part of efforts to envision and articulate desirable futures (Hajer and Pelzer 2018; Karhunmaa 2019).

These perspectives underpin the application of speculative fiction to develop technically grounded images of the future. This approach builds on the methodology of worldbuilding to invite diverse participants to co-create richly detailed stories of the future (Cechanowicz et al. 2016; Fischer and Mehnert 2021; Zaidi 2019). Through these processes of collaborative imagination, it is possible to construct compelling speculative narratives that can serve as vehicles for TA in several ways. First, participants who engage in these activities may come away from their time in a speculative future understanding their work in new ways. Second, broader audiences can interpret and participate in these future worlds as they are captured in accessible public-facing narratives. And finally, the narratives themselves become part of the hermeneutic landscape of TA, often remaining vital long after more technically grounded efforts at prediction have become obsolete.

To illustrate our approach to TA, we will refer to three projects supported by federal agencies in the United States. The resulting books were published between 2017 and 2025. Each presents short stories by science fiction authors alongside works of visual art and essays by experts across an array of fields, from engineering and architecture to public policy and history.

At CSI, we have developed our approach to integrating science fiction into technology assessment inductively, iteratively refining based on resonances, patterns, and lessons from a number of projects. Rather than a formal framework, our approach is more like a sensibility or aesthetic that characterizes how fiction (as well as art and nonfiction) created for our projects relates to social forces and realities, to the notion of many possible futures, and to complex systems and emergent phenomena.

First, our approach insists on polyvocality across stories, art, and essays within each volume. This makes space not only for different perspectives, but also for entirely different framings of the challenges and opportunities stemming from a particular technosocial intersection, with diverging sets of concerns and ethical priorities.

In Cities of Light, we split contributors into four working teams, each of which imagined a solar-powered future for a different U.S. city; the groups selected Chicago, San Antonio, San Juan, and Portland. These diverse physical and social geographies lend themselves to stories that broach different challenges and dramatize a range of ways that communities might adapt to changes in energy systems. In Chicago, a paucity of sunlight in the winter requires investment in energy storage and changes in food systems and lifeways, wherein energy-intensive activities slow down during colder months and premodern habits of food stowage are reintroduced (Bacigalupi 2021). In Portland, climate migration and a housing shortage exacerbate longstanding tensions between the city’s more progressive urban core and conservative elements in suburban areas, which intersect with a grassroots movement to legalize illicit off-grid solar generators (Hudson 2021). Some sections of the book focus on disability and accessibility; others center disaster recovery, the shadow of structural racism, and the feasibility of bio-inspired technologies to support energy transitions.

We should stipulate here that polyvocality does not equal comprehensive representation – neither Cities of Light nor the other projects discussed in this research article claim to represent the perspectives, lived experiences, values, anxieties, or aspirations of populations inhabiting places in which the stories are set; of the U.S. public as a whole; or of any other specific social group or community. Our contributors do hail from a variety of backgrounds, represent various axes of diversity and difference, and have educational and professional training across a broad range of fields and disciplines. However, our groups of contributors for each project (usually ranging from approximately 15–30 people, including fiction and nonfiction authors, artists, designers, coeditors, and other contributors) do tend to overrepresent people with higher than median socioeconomic status, as well as those associated with universities and other high-status institutions. While we continually strive to represent a plurality of voices and experiences, the contributor list from each project invariably fails to include many social groups and constituencies. These books are intended to present a variety of imaginative images of the future with respect to particular technosocial arenas, but we always stress that they are meant to start a larger conversation, to invite further thinking and more stories – not to authoritatively capture the full possibility space, but to highlight the breadth of possibilities to explore.

Second, our science fiction approaches the future as a design space, emphasizing the myriad collective and individual decisions that shape our future trajectories as communities and societies living in relation with technologies. Corey S. Pressman’s story ‘Divided Light’ (2018) in The Weight of Light literalizes these different pathways via a Romeo-and-Juliet narrative: One young paramour lives in a high-tech future Phoenix, Arizona, a heavily surveilled ‘smart’ city shaded by a titanic solar roof, while another lives in a nomadic, anarchic community that eschews smart technologies in favor of a Burning Man-esque DIY aesthetic that embraces the harsh aridity of the Sonoran Desert. Both communities rely on solar technologies, but based on divergent cultures and clashing ideologies, each imagines its relationship to energy and the natural world in a starkly different way.

Third, our stories emphasize unforeseen and emergent consequences of technological change, with particular attention to differential impacts based on people’s social identities. In Andrew Dana Hudson’s ‘Under the Grid’ (2018) in The Weight of Light, Detroit has constructed scaffolding for a solar roof, but individual property owners are responsible for generating energy for the grid in their vertical ‘skyspaces.’ Neighborhood-level Homeowners Associations (HOAs) coordinate the use of these skyspaces for energy generation, urban agriculture, and aesthetics. Ingrid is an enthusiastic young employee overseeing the grid’s operations; her chronically ill mother, Krystal, faces eviction when her HOA frowns on how she has used her skyspace to shelter migratory birds displaced by climate change. It’s a bittersweet story – Ingrid and Krystal grow closer through a campaign to change the HOA’s policies, but they lose the pivotal community vote.

Ingrid decides to shift careers, from policing skyspace use to supporting a more expansive definition of biodiversity in a world where terms like ‘native’ and ‘invasive’ are losing their meaning. Premised on the solarization of a major city, the story reveals several wrinkles in implementation: How do energy systems deal with equity and access? What local institutions determine and enforce energy policies, and how are variations or disagreements adjudicated? How do infrastructure projects intersect with local ecologies, particularly amid the transformations caused by climate chaos? How do we square environmental priorities, like decarbonizing our economies and protecting biodiversity, when they come into conflict?

In our approach, literary, character-driven storytelling introduces to technology assessment psychological and emotional registers of meaning-making and motivation.

Fourth, in our approach, literary, character-driven storytelling introduces to TA psychological and emotional registers of meaning-making and motivation, at individual and communal levels. These forces are powerful factors in technopolitics, but are often underplayed in traditional TA methods. Patriotism and notions of public duty come to the fore in Carter Meland’s ‘Generating Hope’ (2025), in Our Radioactive Neighbors, which imagines an alternate U.S. history in which individual households take responsibility for small, hermetically sealed ‘caskettes’ of nuclear waste, stored in or near the home. Drawing on President Eisenhower’s ‘Atoms for Peace’ speech at the United Nations in 1953, Meland imagines a Cold War–era U.S. that becomes enchanted with nuclear technology. In this timeline, the problem of storing the nation’s nuclear waste is resolved by appealing to the civic values of individual families. Policy discussions about nuclear siting often appeal to economistic imperatives and logics, promising jobs creation or weighing risks of radiation releases against various forms of compensation for neighboring communities. Meland’s story reveals emotional and ideological constructs that could circumvent or override these more quantifiable elements, speaking to the powerful role of shared values in real-world decision-making.

Fifth, the stories produced through our process are designed to invite active interpretation and catalyze conversations among readers. Reaching toward theoretical ideals like Umberto Eco’s ‘open work’ (1979), they leave space for readers to create different meanings and disagree constructively about ideas and conclusions emanating from engagement with the text. This is arguably a feature of all fiction; something as simple as characters expressing divergent views might encourage multiple interpretations. Stories created through our approach, however, often contain a more variegated texture of ideas and potential meanings, because they have their foundation in highly collaborative workshops.

Carter Scholz’s ‘Vanguard 2.0’ (2017), in Visions, Ventures, Escape Velocities, follows Sergei, a technician cleaning up debris in Low Earth Orbit for a firm run by a possibly sinister billionaire. Scholz amplifies our uncertainty, withholding dispositive proof of Sergei’s suspicions and emphasizing his own sense of complicity and dissociation from the consequences of his work. ‘Vanguard 2.0’ raises many unanswered questions for the reader to puzzle over: Is the billionaire angling to place weapons platforms in orbit? If private firms are the only ones cleaning up space debris, is it ethical to work for them? In a world destabilized by resource wars, climate migration, and economic inequality, what is the individual’s duty to act with moral clarity anyway? Who ought to set rules and regulations, and govern space? Should private-sector actors be empowered to act off-world at all? Are they the only institutions nimble enough to work in such hazardous, expensive environs?

Sixth, our narratives center marginalized, unexpected, and challenging perspectives. In Vandana Singh’s ‘Shikasta’ (2017) in Visions, Ventures, Escape Velocities, a collective of scientists from the Global South conduct a crowdfunded search for life on distant exoplanets. To quote an introductory essay for the book, “Singh’s story… complicates the scientific methods and theories that we use to guide our exploration of the cosmos: her characters bring their rich personal histories and Indigenous ways of knowing into dialogue with mainstream scientific and technological practices, which enables them to recognize, theorize about, and study phenomena that traditional approaches might miss” (Bell 2017, p. xxxi). The life form that the scientists encounter is a liminal being that doesn’t resemble the kinds of ‘aliens’ that dominate popular-media portrayals. It’s precisely the ways of knowing honed by lives on the margins of the global scientific community that enable this multicultural team to consider the notion that this entity might be a fellow living (and intelligent) inhabitant of the universe.

Likewise, in Deji Bryce Olukotun’s ‘The Scent of the Freetails’ (2021) in Cities of Light, the social identities of the protagonists illuminate issues that might otherwise go unnoticed in this speculation about a solar-powered suburban community outside San Antonio, Texas. The narrator, Raj, is a petrochemical engineer and immigrant from Guyana who has worked doggedly in the face of prejudice to assimilate to a Texan way of life. Raj’s hard-won assimilation to a fossil-fuel-powered American Dream makes the prospect of moving his family to a solar-powered eco-community feel threatening. Will he once again struggle to fit in? Are the benefits worth sacrificing the identity that he has spent decades constructing? Meanwhile, Raj’s daughter uses a prosthetic leg, and he worries about her safety in this ‘Dark Sky’ community, which limits outdoor lighting to make the starry sky more visible and support nocturnal wildlife. Olukotun uses his characters to probe at challenges and anxieties that attend a solar transition, which allows him to openly address those issues and imagine responses that could create a more equitable future.

Seventh, in our approach, stories represent social and technical issues as entangled, part of complex and dynamic systems, rather than neatly separating human and technical factors. In Madeline Ashby’s ‘Death on Mars’ (2017) in Visions, Ventures, Escape Velocities, a crew of astronauts journeys to Phobos, a moon of Mars, for a ‘planetary protection’ mission to gather soil samples. It’s also a test for the notion of a mission crewed entirely by women; their lower average body weight and caloric needs are boons for long missions, and it’s theorized that there may be benefits in crew dynamics.

When a drill on the surface malfunctions, a male computer scientist is sent to join the crew. He’s brought along some assisted-suicide drugs for Donna, a crew member who has been diagnosed with terminal cancer during the mission and has opted thus far to keep her diagnosis a secret. The arrival of this interloper and Donna’s impending death throw the crew into a chaotic muddle. The precepts of medical ethics – particularly, the patient’s prerogative not to share medical information – come into conflict with the social and logistical stresses of a lengthy, perilous mission. The narrative threads converge when Donna volunteers to conduct a deadly manual repair on the drill. However, leaving a corpse on Phobos threatens the integrity of the mission to collect samples uncontaminated by human DNA.

Ashby’s story puts into dynamic tension social, scientific, interpersonal, and political considerations: medical ethics, gender politics, friendship and mourning, the place of privacy in a communal working environment, the application of environmentalist concepts to space via the discourse of planetary protection, age-old sci-fi tropes around automation and the ineluctable role of the human in complex technological systems, and the positioning of astronauts as both scientific professionals and public figures with strong political resonances. The narrative folds these issues into a drama about the mission and the grief of these characters who depend upon and love one another. Crucially, it entangles the issues, demonstrating rather than lecturing to the reader that they are hopelessly caught up in and feeding into one another, the private into the public, the interpersonal into the political, the scientific into the ideological.

Taken together, these seven features model a form of ‘applied imagination’ (Finn et al. 2023) in the context of TA. Some of these, such as polyvocality and treating the future as a design space, are elements of other methods, but the synthesis of all seven in the approach presented here offers a compelling potential contribution to TA. This applied imagination approach shares some kinship with hermeneutic TA, with an important difference: rather than focusing on the work of interpretation or turning the future into a cultural object of study, it seeks to explore an expansive possibility space for images of the future and to consider how multifarious cultural, interpersonal, and political factors might condition the effects of technological change on communities and societies. Engaging the literary imagination along with interdisciplinary collaboration and knowledge-sharing, our approach produces multiple nuanced narratives about potential future consequences of technological change and about how individuals and groups might respond to, contend with, or seek to reshape their relationships with technological systems in those futures.

Our approach produces multiple nuanced narratives about potential future consequences of technological change.

Each of the features identified here can enrich any form of TA, but some are more difficult to incorporate without the unique affordances of speculative fiction. Entanglement, centering marginalized perspectives, and the psychological and affective registers of future-making are particularly suited to fiction, where complexity and ambiguity can be effectively conceived and conveyed by skilled writers. These features also cut against narratives of objectivity embedded in more quantitative methods, where the seeming rigor of empiricism can conceal hidden assumptions and tensions that evade straightforward measurement.