Technology is all-around us; all-around us means it is used by individuals and, that is, it has a place in at least one subgroup of society. Thus, such an artifact will shape in the one or other way people’s behavior, intention and lately the settings and values of society. Does this happen in a good way? A good way means not to dictate the use of an artifact, nor is that technology evil or per se something harmful to us. To be aware of technology’s influence means to think about the possible impacts on our society’s values and to rearrange them proactively, both as human beings as well as society.

Why do we care about this? The intention is not to control or to over-regulate something, because a pure crowd or swarm of people could enforce the society onto a path they would not take normally. It would direct the society without people’s intention. For example, we have to rethink the concept of individual mobility. Everyone would agree that individual mobility is, or should be the best way to connect two remote points. But, on the other hand, we know a lot about its negative effects on health, environment and resources. Thus, we have to present possible outcomes to discuss the effects; afterwards we have to decide the direction in which we intend to further develop.

There are many other effects on our reasoning concerning the question on how to integrate something into our society; about the role of law and its anticipation of changes in our social settings; and, finally, our measures of evaluation and measures of distribution will be affected, too i.e. our understanding and interpretation of human values like justice, fairness, and the distribution of services and goods may be affected as well.

Evaluation has so many different dimensions and one of them is to think about so called innovations. Innovations are important for our industrialized societies, but most of the time so called felt innovations are a regress in many properties and a progress only in a single dimension. But how shall we evaluate something like this or something related to the progress in medical research? And how shall we communicate science and innovations to the people? Is there a way in which we can educate them to both, to creative engineers and people reflecting the social and philosophical outcomes?

We don’t need to give further examples of how science and technology do affect our society and daily life. Science and technology are so embedded in the society, that we cannot simply separate them from each other. We have made great intellectual advances in understanding the epistemic, normative, and social dimensions of a world profoundly shaped by our science and technology. Especially in our age of information technology, global warming, and bioengineering such a reflection is necessary. However, how to make a remarkable contribution for the future as a public spokesman or sometimes as a policy advisor, and how to play a more active role in establishing a more diverse and alternative imaginary for tomorrow are still something we should deal with.

For some historical and cultural reason, we have different contexts and routines to conduct the STS related research in East and West. But we still share some similarity in the path of development and also in the arena of globalization. The purpose of this meeting accordingly, is to bridge up the gap by some fruitful dialogue concerning the remarkable tomorrow. The topics of this meeting will cover:

•    Thinking in Complexity in the Natural and Social System （思考自然和社会系统中的复杂性）
•    Public Understanding and Awareness of Science and Technology （公众对于科学技术的理解和体认）
•    Science and Innovation Policy in a Multi-Polar World （多极化世界中的科学和创新政策）
•    Rethinking Evaluation and Reasoning in the Mirror of Artifacts （在人工物之境中反思评估和推理）

Center for Science, Technology and Society, Tsinghua University (THU) is the host of this event and Carl von Linde-Akademie, Technische Universität München (TUM) will co-organize this meeting from 10-11, October, 2011 at Tsinghua University, as a first step of this communication and for further studies. All the keynote speech and papers will be published in journal special issue after being peer-reviewed.

This meeting is open to the public, but registration is necessary due to limit spaces. Please email us if you have the intent to participate or if you have any questions: start11@quantius.org

会议时间：10月10-11日

会议地点：清华大学（具体地点待定）

会议主页：http://www.quantius.org/content/start11introduction