Lab' RASSCAS

The origins and aims of RASSCAS (Recherche Appliquée en Sciences Sociales pour Concevoir un Anthropocène Soutenable)

Since 1950, we have entered the "Anthropocene", a geological era in which the main lever for transforming the biological and chemical balances of the Earth system is human activity (Crutzen, 2002).
Now, this human activity is deeply impacted by Information and Communication Technologies (ICT). It is therefore essential to design innovations and to think about their uses and evolutions within acceptable social and ecological limits in order to preserve a safe and just space for peace and life (Raworth, 2017).
It is to respond to this challenge that we have created RASSCAS, a transdisciplinary laboratory in technical, human, economic and social sciences. Our ambition is to move from a regime of innovation per se, to a regime of regenerative progress for companies, human groups and the living. We therefore produce practical tools that can be used by the engineers we train and by the companies with which we collaborate.
When we talk about innovation, thinking has remained stuck in the old paradigm and has not learned the lessons of the Anthropocene.
Our initial work has led us to define a virtuous cycle in which any innovative approach should be included. It is based on three interdependent axes that go beyond the three pillars of design, namely

• the imaginary ones, which are shared between dystopia and technosolutionism.
• the debate between high and low tech, which focuses on technological intensity and not necessarily on the use made of it.
• user-centered design, which embeds the anthropocentrism of our visions, instrumentalizes the living and therefore does not respond to what should be a "responsible design";

RASSCAS therefore proposes to go beyond these anthropocentric dualities by exploring the following lines of research:

• Axis 1: Imagination and the Anthropocene
  Since our imaginations have a power over the way we conceive our technologies, it is essential, in our opinion, to relearn how to think collectively about the future on realistic scales of action, at the level of a company, a collective, or a territory, for example. By making these collective visions sustainable, feasible and desirable, we lay the foundations for designing technologies that are compatible with the imperatives and uncertainties of the Anthropocene.
• Axis 2: Safe and Just Space Technologies
  The technical systems we design should contribute to the preservation, and even, when possible, to the regeneration of the environmental and social conditions that allow humans to develop in safety and equity. These technologies must therefore be designed with circularity in mind, then associated with uses that have positive impacts, and finally made available and commercialized according to non-degenerative business models.
• Axis 3: Life centered design
  To take into account the protection and regeneration needs of living beings, technology design processes must learn to give a voice to non-humans. We are therefore developing tools to invite these too-often neglected stakeholders into the heart of the design process. In this approach, the needs of humans (users, customers, end-users, etc.) are considered in the same way as those of the ecosystems in which they operate.