Shaping technology while it is being made

29 September 2026

Constructive technology assessment (CTA) treats the development of a technology as something society takes part in, not something society reacts to afterwards. This analysis reviews four decades of mostly academic work on CTA and its relatives, and reads it for the perspective on development it offers: what its practitioners look at, what they draw and write, and which diagrams, designers and editors that perspective calls for.

Part 1

The dilemma CTA starts from

CTA began as a policy programme in the Netherlands in the mid-1980s and was developed into a research tradition at the University of Twente. Its founding diagnosis is institutional: one set of actors promotes a technology and a different set controls it, later, as a matter of impacts.

Two tracks
Modern societies split the work between the promotion of technology (ministries of economic affairs, research funders, firms) and its control (safety, environmental and ethical regulation, and classic technology assessment). Societal aspects therefore arrive only once a design is fixed. CTA was proposed as a way to bring those aspects into the promotion track itself, softening the split through what Schot and Rip call sociotechnical criticism.
Rip, Misa & Schot 1995 · Schot & Rip 1997
The Collingridge dilemma
Early in its development a technology is easy to change, but too little is known about its consequences; by the time the consequences are known, it is entrenched and change is slow and expensive. Collingridge’s own answer was not better forecasting but corrigibility: keeping options open, avoiding over-commitment and supporting several alternatives. A later reading stresses that he is better understood as a theorist of accountability and pluralism than as a pessimist about prediction.
Collingridge 1980 · Genus & Stirling 2018
From early warning to shaping
Parliamentary technology assessment, such as the former US Office of Technology Assessment, was an early-warning service that predicted impacts for legislators. CTA redefines assessment as the modulation of development while it happens, which in turn requires understanding how development actually proceeds.
Schot 1992 · Schot & Rip 1997
Three criteria
Schot and Rip propose judging a CTA effort by three qualities of the development process rather than by the number of actors consulted: anticipation (of effects and of the dynamics themselves), reflexivity (actors seeing that technology and its setting are co-produced, and their own role in that) and social learning (first-order learning about the technology and its users, second-order learning about the values and frames the actors bring).
Schot & Rip 1997 · Schot 2001

Part 2

Technology and society co-evolve

The theoretical core of CTA is a model of how technology develops. It is neither a linear pipeline from research to market nor a free choice by developers, but a co-evolution of technical options with users, markets, regulation and meaning.

The quasi-evolutionary model
Schot combined evolutionary economics with the sociology of technology. New technical options (variation) and the markets, regulations and users that judge them (selection) are not independent: actors link them, a role he calls the technological nexus. Three strategies follow: stimulate alternative variations, change the selection environment, and create or use nexus institutions, for instance by bringing regulators into research and development early.
Schot 1992
Regimes, niches and landscapes
The Twente lineage produced the multi-level perspective. Radical novelties emerge in protected niches, the established socio-technical regime of rules and practices resists or absorbs them, and a slowly changing landscape exerts pressure on both. Strategic niche management turns the first CTA strategy into practice: protected experiments in which a new technology, its users and its network learn together.
Rip & Kemp 1998 · Kemp, Schot & Hoogma 1998 · Geels 2002
Scripts
Developers inscribe a vision of users, contexts and divisions of labour into an artefact. Users may follow that script, adapt it or reject it. CTA adopted the notion to show that design choices are social choices, and that early interaction with users can change a script before it hardens.
Akrich 1992
Irreversibilities and entanglement
As development proceeds, choices harden into sunk investments, standards, networks and shared expectations, and options narrow. An emerging technology also becomes entangled with other actors, industries and regulatory debates. CTA analysts map these emerging irreversibilities to find where an intervention can still make a difference.
Rip 2010 · Rip & te Kulve 2008
De facto governance
Much of the governance of a new technology is designed by nobody. It emerges from codes of conduct, research agendas, standards, expectations and the moves of many actors. Rip argues that CTA’s task is to make this de facto governance visible and more reflexive, and also studies the folk theories technology actors hold about society, such as the belief that the public will reject nanotechnology as it rejected genetically modified food.
Rip 2006, folk theories · Rip 2006, reflexive governance · Rip 2018
Societal embedding inside the firm
Deuten, Rip and Jelsma brought the perspective into product development: regulation, public acceptance and user contexts can be managed as part of product creation, and a technology and its context have to be aligned rather than one simply adopting the other.
Deuten, Rip & Jelsma 1997

Part 3

Expectations do work

A second pillar of CTA is the sociology of expectations. Statements about the future are not forecasts standing beside development; they steer it.

Prospective structures
Van Lente and Rip describe expectations as structures to be filled in by agency: a promise about a technology creates positions, tasks and obligations that actors then take up.
van Lente 1993 · van Lente & Rip 1998
The promise-requirement cycle
Once a promise is accepted it becomes a requirement: an agenda item, a mandate or a protected space that actors must deliver on, and that legitimates resources for the next promise. The study of membrane technology traced this cycle from rhetoric to social reality.
van Lente & Rip 1998, membrane technology
Coordination and hype
Expectations coordinate actors, attract resources and structure agendas, and they produce cycles of hype and disappointment. The generic hype curve has itself been criticised for lacking empirical support, which argues for tracing expectations from evidence rather than drawing one standard curve.
Borup, Brown, Konrad & van Lente 2006 · Dedehayir & Steinert 2016
Waiting games
In organic and large-area electronics, diffuse promises produced a stalemate: firms would not invest until demand was articulated, and demand could not be articulated without products. CTA scenarios were written precisely to break such impasses.
Parandian, Rip & te Kulve 2012
Assessing expectations
Lucivero, Swierstra and Boenink propose judging an expectation on three lines: technical feasibility, societal usability and desirability. Vision assessment and hermeneutic technology assessment go further, reading far-reaching visions for what they mean today rather than as predictions.
Lucivero, Swierstra & Boenink 2011 · Grin & Grunwald 2000 · Grunwald 2016

Part 4

Mapping dynamics and writing endogenous futures

The second generation of CTA, developed largely in the Dutch nanotechnology research programme NanoNed, turned the theory into a sequence of analytic steps: map the dynamics of a domain, identify the futures that follow from those dynamics, write them as scenarios, and use the scenarios as the platform for a workshop.

Dynamics mapping
Van Merkerk and Robinson characterised the emergence of lab-on-a-chip technology in three layers over time: expectations, agendas that guide actors’ priorities, and the networks that arise from their interactions. Te Kulve and Rip use a multi-level analysis of a whole value chain, from material suppliers through food producers to retailers and regulators, as the companion of the scenarios.
van Merkerk & Robinson 2006 · te Kulve & Rip 2011
Endogenous futures
Rather than imagining futures from outside, CTA writes futures that follow from dynamics already under way. Socio-technical scenarios are narratives in which technical and social developments co-evolve along several paths, with branching points where actors’ choices or outside events send the story one way or another.
Rip & te Kulve 2008 · Robinson 2009
Annotated scenarios
Parandian and Rip published the scenarios used in their organic electronics workshops together with annotations showing how each was constructed, which makes the step from analysis to narrative visible and open to challenge.
Parandian & Rip 2013
Multi-path mapping
Roadmapping assumes the products are known. For emerging science they are not, so Robinson and Propp chart several possible innovation paths at once, from research lines through platforms to applications, with bottlenecks and the alignments each path needs. In a workshop version the paths are widened by participants and synthesised afterwards into a small number of pathways.
Robinson & Propp 2008 · Guo et al. 2012 · Phaal, Farrukh & Probert 2004
Transition scenarios
Related work on system transitions writes scenarios on the multi-level diagram itself: niche innovations link up, regime actors respond and a transition follows one of a small set of pathway types, such as transformation, reconfiguration or technological substitution.
Hofman & Elzen 2010 · Geels & Schot 2007
Controversy and issue mapping
Neighbouring work in science and technology studies maps controversies as networks of statements, actors and issues over time, and increasingly generates those maps from digital data in collaborative data sprints.
Venturini 2010 · Marres 2015 · Munk, Meunier & Venturini 2019

Part 5

Bringing enactors and selectors together

The distinctive intervention of CTA is the interactive workshop. It deliberately mixes people who build a technology with people who will judge it, before the choices are made.

Enactors and selectors
Garud and Ahlstrom distinguish insiders, or enactors, who create technological variations and present them as solutions, from outsiders, or selectors, who start from their own definition of the problem and compare alternatives. The friction between these frames drives the dynamics of a field. CTA turns the distinction into a design principle: bring both perspectives together before lock-in, so that developers can anticipate how their work will be judged.
Garud & Ahlstrom 1997
Strategy-articulation workshops
Scenarios, the dynamics map and the key dilemmas are sent to participants as a dossier beforehand. The workshop presents them, lets mixed groups explore a scenario or dilemma each, and ends with a discussion of strategies and possible coordination. The purpose is not consensus but better-articulated strategies on all sides.
Rip & te Kulve 2008 · Robinson 2010
Pre-engagement
Te Kulve and Rip argue that stakeholders can only engage productively once they are prepared for it. Multi-level analysis and socio-technical scenarios are therefore pre-engagement tools: they give participants something concrete to react to, which early stakeholders otherwise lack.
te Kulve & Rip 2011
Bridging events
Parandian frames CTA workshops as bridging events that stimulate learning by anticipation, and analysed participants’ evaluations to find what made them productive: chiefly how the scenarios and dilemmas were structured and facilitated.
Parandian 2012
The methodology of insertion
Rip and Robinson describe the CTA analyst as someone who inserts themselves into ongoing developments as a soft intervention: close enough to be useful to technology actors, distant enough to broaden their view. The analyst’s double role as observer and intervener is acknowledged as a tension, not resolved.
Rip & Robinson 2013 · Konrad, Rip & Schulze Greiving 2017
Lighter formats
CTA-lite lets a technical PhD researcher, supported by a facilitator, run a single multi-actor workshop around an innovation path map for their own research. Role-play simulations let engineering students experience stakeholder dynamics directly. The Twente CTA Toolbox packages these as named tools.
Schulze Greiving et al. 2016 · Schulze Greiving et al. 2023 · CTA Toolbox

Part 6

Modulating development from within

A parallel strand, mainly from the United States, moved assessment into the laboratory itself: not a separate event, but a routine part of how researchers and engineers make decisions.

Real-time technology assessment
Guston and Sarewitz build social science into a research programme from the start: analogical case studies, mapping the research programme, communication and early warning, and assessment and choice. Anticipatory governance generalises this into three capacities a society needs: foresight, engagement and integration.
Guston & Sarewitz 2002 · Barben, Fisher, Selin & Guston 2008 · Guston 2014
Midstream modulation
Fisher, Mahajan and Mitcham locate responsibility between upstream agenda-setting and downstream regulation: in the everyday decisions of research. Modulation moves from de facto (it happens anyway), to reflexive (researchers are aware of it), to deliberate (they steer it).
Fisher, Mahajan & Mitcham 2006
The decision protocol
In Socio-Technical Integration Research an embedded humanist or social scientist works alongside a laboratory for some weeks. Together they walk concrete research decisions through a simple protocol: the opportunity (what is being decided), the considerations (technical and social), the alternatives, and the outcomes (who might care, and what follows). Studies report both first-order reflection on practical decisions and second-order reflection on the laboratory’s assumptions, in university and in industrial settings.
Fisher 2007 · Schuurbiers 2011 · Flipse, van der Sanden & Osseweijer 2013 · Fisher & Schuurbiers 2013
Responsible research and innovation
The responsible innovation framework of Stilgoe, Owen and Macnaghten has four dimensions: anticipation, reflexivity, inclusion and responsiveness. The lineage from CTA is direct; three of Schot and Rip’s criteria reappear almost unchanged. Owen and colleagues describe responsible innovation as an iterative, flexible and adaptive process embedded in existing governance.
Owen, Macnaghten & Stilgoe 2012 · Stilgoe, Owen & Macnaghten 2013
Tentative governance
Kuhlmann, Stegmaier and Konrad describe governance under uncertainty as provisional by design: flexible, learning and reflexive, ready to be revised as a technology and its effects become clearer.
Kuhlmann, Stegmaier & Konrad 2019

Part 7

Making values and arguments explicit

A family of methods, many from the philosophy of technology, gives the normative side of CTA a structure. Each produces a recognisable artefact.

Values, norms and requirements
Value sensitive design combines conceptual, empirical and technical investigations, iterated. Van de Poel’s values hierarchy makes the translation explicit as a tree: a value is specified into norms and norms into design requirements, and each requirement exists for the sake of the norm above it. Care-centred value sensitive design applies this to care robots.
Friedman, Kahn & Borning 2006 · Friedman & Hendry 2019 · van de Poel 2013 · van Wynsberghe 2013
The ethical matrix
Mepham’s matrix crosses ethical principles (wellbeing, autonomy, fairness) with the groups affected by a technology, and asks what each principle means for each group. In participatory use the cells are discussed and weighed.
Mepham 2000 · Ethical Matrix Manual
Checklists and levels
Ethical technology assessment offers a checklist of recurring ethical aspects, from privacy and power to sustainability and justice. Anticipatory technology ethics separates three levels of analysis: the technology, its artefacts and its applications. Kiran, Oudshoorn and Verbeek argue for going beyond checklists towards an ethical-constructive assessment that looks at how a technology mediates practices.
Palm & Hansson 2006 · Brey 2012 · Kiran, Oudshoorn & Verbeek 2015
Techno-moral scenarios
Swierstra, Stemerding and Boenink write scenarios in acts: the current moral landscape, a technology that provokes controversy in recurring argument patterns, and a closure that becomes the starting point of the next cycle. Values are treated as changing along with the technology, not as fixed yardsticks.
Swierstra, Stemerding & Boenink 2009 · Boenink, Swierstra & Stemerding 2010
Argument maps
Argument analysis reconstructs a technology debate as theses and arguments with premises and conclusions, linked by support and attack. The map of the climate engineering debate by Betz and Cacean is a large worked example. Its authors built their own tooling, Argunet, and later a text-first syntax, Argdown, in which the text is written and the map is drawn from it.
Brun & Betz 2016 · Betz & Cacean 2012 · Argunet and Argdown

Part 8

CTA and its relatives in software and AI

For software, the perspective arrives mostly through responsible research and innovation, value-centred design and, more recently, impact assessments of AI. Direct comparisons of CTA with agile development are absent from the peer-reviewed literature found, but the points of contact are explicit.

Responsible innovation in ICT
Jirotka and colleagues argue that ethics review in computing misses broader societal consequences, and propose the AREA approach: anticipate, reflect, engage, act. Work in this programme names what makes ICT distinctive: open-endedness, embeddedness, the pace of development and the problem of many hands. A maturity model tested in three ICT-for-health settings found responsible innovation workable in corporate processes.
Jirotka et al. 2017 · Eden, Jirotka & Stahl 2013 · Stahl et al. 2017
Values in software engineering
A research roadmap calls for operationalising human values in software. A case study of the Scaled Agile Framework found five kinds of intervention point for values: artefacts, roles, ceremonies, practices and culture. Value-based requirements engineering gives elicitation guidance, and IEEE 7000 standardises a process from eliciting values to system requirements. Values levers, practices such as interdisciplinary teams and self-testing, open the conversation about values inside a development team.
Mougouei et al. 2018 · Hussain et al. 2022 · Thew & Sutcliffe 2018 · IEEE 7000-2021 · Shilton 2013
Ethics inside agile teams
Gogoll, Zuber and colleagues argue that codes of conduct are not enough and that ethical deliberation belongs inside development teams, and that agile processes suit this because their iterations, short feedback loops and team autonomy give it natural places. Embedded ethics in AI development follows the same line as midstream modulation.
Gogoll et al. 2021 · Zuber et al. 2022 · McLennan et al. 2020
Participatory design
The Scandinavian tradition shares CTA’s commitment to involving those affected before a system is fixed. Its own retrospective calls for participatory design that matters: high technological ambition, deployed prototypes and alliances that scale. In agile projects, participation has to distinguish the customer, who holds decision power, from the end user, who knows the work.
Kensing & Blomberg 1998 · Bødker & Kyng 2018 · Kautz 2011
Impact assessments for algorithms and AI
Canada’s directive on automated decision-making requires a questionnaire-based assessment that places a system in one of four impact levels, each with its own obligations. The Ada Lovelace Institute designed a staged assessment, including a participatory workshop, as a condition for access to a medical imaging dataset. Reviews of the growing number of AI ethics tools find they concentrate on the development phase and rarely address monitoring after deployment.
Government of Canada · Groves et al. 2022 · Morley et al. 2020 · Goñi et al. 2024
Institutional practice
Parliamentary assessment offices continue alongside CTA: the Rathenau Instituut’s report on digitisation called for public values to be secured structurally, and the European network of these offices has reported on AI and democracy and on generative AI. In the Netherlands, ELSA labs study the ethical, legal and societal aspects of AI on real cases with public partners, and an exploratory quantum technology assessment was launched in 2023 as a step-by-step tool for organisations.
Kool, Timmer & van Est 2017 · EPTA 2023 · NWO ELSA labs · Quantum Delta NL
Software never stops being made
Veul and Krabbenborg argue that ICTs are liminal: they keep being innovated after release, so responsible innovation needs retrospective as well as anticipatory practices. Stahl argues that intelligent systems are systems of systems, so responsibility has to be designed at the level of the ecosystem. The Dutch smart meter rollout, halted by the Senate in 2009 over privacy and redesigned with an opt-out, shows the cost of broadening late.
Veul & Krabbenborg 2024 · Stahl 2023 · Hoenkamp, Huitema & de Moor-van Vugt 2011

Part 9

Limits and critiques

CTA’s own authors and its critics agree on several weaknesses. They matter for any tool built on the perspective, because a tool can make them worse or better.

Power
Genus and Coles argue that CTA’s orientation towards co-construction underplays differences in agenda, influence and resources, so that already powerful actors dominate and decisions are democratised less than claimed. Genus proposes recasting CTA explicitly as democratic, reflective discourse with stated normative commitments.
Genus & Coles 2005 · Genus 2006
Neutrality and co-optation
The analyst both analyses the dynamics and intervenes in them, the scenarios are not neutral, and the work is often funded by the research programmes being assessed. The risk is that CTA becomes a way to smooth acceptance rather than to broaden design.
Rip & Robinson 2013 · Rip & van Lente 2013
Impact is hard to show
As a soft intervention, CTA’s effects on actual development paths are diffuse. A review of 52 articles on responsible innovation practice found practices across all its dimensions but thin evidence of impact, and a review of value sensitive design projects found recurring gaps in how the method was applied.
Schuijff & Dijkstra 2020 · Winkler & Spiekermann 2021
Who is included
CTA focuses on technology actors and organised stakeholders. Deliberative formats such as Danish consensus conferences and scenario workshops give lay citizens a larger role, and responsible innovation’s inclusion dimension partly answers this gap.
Joss 1998 · Andersen & Jæger 1999

Across the parts

The perspective in seven propositions

Read together, the literature describes a different stance towards development, not only a method of assessment. Stated as propositions for anyone building a technology, software included:

The design space is socio-technical. Who takes part and which aspects count are design decisions in their own right, made early whether or not anyone notices.
Time is the scarce resource. Choices harden into irreversibilities; the useful question is which options are still open and what would close them.
Expectations are inputs. Promises steer work and should be recorded, traced and judged for plausibility and desirability, not taken as given.
Futures are drawn from present dynamics. Scenarios built from mapped actors, agendas and pathways are more useful than predictions or free speculation.
Enactors and selectors belong together early. The people who build and the people who judge should meet while the script can still change.
Reflexivity is routine work. It lives in recurring small decisions and protocols, not only in one-off reviews.
Dissent and uncertainty are data. Keeping disagreement, plausibility and the reasons behind a choice visible is the point, not a failure to converge.

From perspective to tools

Tools the perspective calls for

Nearly every CTA artefact is either a network or pathway (a diagram), a structured form or matrix (a designer), or a structured narrative (an editor). The candidates below are named by their kind and by the elements and relations a tool engineer would specify.

Candidate tool	Kind	Elements	Relations and attributes
Multi-level map	Diagram	Niche innovations, regime rules, landscape pressures, actors	Level, time; pressures, links up with, replaces
Innovation path map	Diagram	Research lines, platforms, applications, bottlenecks	Paths across layers; actors, alignment needed
Socio-technical scenario	Editor with a diagram	Starting situation, dynamics, branching points, storylines	Branches over time; link to the path map
Expectations register	Designer	Promise, source, date, owner, plausibility	Promise becomes requirement; later checked
Actor and value chain map	Diagram	Enactors, selectors, nexus institutions	Selects, supplies, regulates, aligns with
Irreversibility log	Designer	Choice, date, what it closes, reversal cost	Status open or hardened
Decision protocol	Designer	Opportunity, considerations, alternatives, outcomes	Versioned per decision; modulation stage
Values hierarchy	Diagram	Values, norms, design requirements	Specifies; for the sake of
Ethical matrix	Designer	Principles by affected groups	Cell judgement, weight, contributor
Argument map	Editor with a diagram	Theses, arguments, premises	Supports, attacks; text form as in Argdown
Techno-moral scenario	Editor	Moral landscape, controversy, closure	Argument patterns per act
Workshop record	Editor	Groups, contributions, changes made	Contribution linked to the element it changed

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Method: literature searches on 29 September 2026 across three strands: the theory and history of constructive technology assessment, its methods and the artefacts they produce, and its application to software, ICT and AI. Every source listed was found in live search results with matching authors, title and venue, but the research environment could not open publisher pages or repositories, so the descriptions rest on abstracts, index summaries and the established secondary literature rather than on a full reading of each text. The internal layout of some artefacts (the exact layers of a path map, the columns of a checklist) is described at the level of detail the abstracts support. No peer-reviewed comparison of CTA itself with agile development was found; the links drawn to agile practice come from work on responsible innovation, values and ethics in software engineering.