Designers (industrial designers, graphic designers, and architects) routinely engage with and employ emerging technologies in their design processes and in finished products. Through processes of design and construction, revolutionary materials, new hardware and software, and innovative mechanisms get regularly inserted into the artifacts of everyday use. CriticalCorps assesses the social consequences of these technological objects by subjecting them to the vigorous scrutiny of theoretical models as well as empirical analysis. CriticalCorps will engage with the new Center for Nanotechnology in Society at Arizona State University (CNS@ASU) to examine the role that designers and users will play in assimilating nanotechnology into the objects, images, and spaces of everyday life.

As designers typically create user scenarios to predict problems that may arise in interactions between users and artifacts, this area presents itself as a location for fruitful collaboration between engineers, social scientists and designers. Such a collaboration can help uncover the ability/threat this technology possesses in changing the nature of our material landscape, and how it can thereby influence our lifestyles, routines, attitudes and values. CriticalCorps and InnovationSpace will assist CNS@ASU at two stages of the scenario development process—in the development of the scenarios and in their critical analysis. This process will include participation from faculty, undergraduate students, and graduate students.

The Collaboration between CriticalCorps and CNS@ASU will lead to:

• Critical cultural analyses of the new objects, images, spaces, and services that will emerge when nanoscience and technology enter everyday life.

• Creation of innovative analytical tools that will help to critically examine scenarios depicting possible interactions between users and nanotechnological artifacts.

• Fundamental research that will clarify how designers, scientists, and engineers may inform and influence each other's discourses, practices, and outcomes in the area of nanotechnology.

• New multidisciplinary educational opportunities for undergraduate and graduate students to study the design dimensions, material manifestations, and social implications of nanoscience and engineering.