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Paper short abstract

Safe and Sustainable by Design (SSbD) sets safety and sustainability upfront as design requirements for chemical innovation. However, the heterogeneity within SSbD research communities keeps these requirements as constraints rather than generative conditions for innovation and sociotechnical change.

Paper long abstract

Safe and Sustainable by Design (SSbD) is a framework for stimulating a transition towards safer and more sustainable chemicals. By setting safety and sustainability as upfront design requirements for chemical innovation, SSbD can spawn a new wave of chemicals, materials, and products that promote a more resilient future and regenerative chemical industry. In this vision of SSbD, safety, sustainability, and design are concepts mobilised as “productive constraints” for innovation, requiring cross- and interdisciplinary collaboration across a variety of stakeholders and research communities. SSbD is often understood as a sequence of assessments that seamlessly combine methods and tools from different disciplines. In practice, however, the interaction and collaboration between them does not easily come about, raising questions about the effectiveness and stability of SSbD for building a more resilient future. In this paper, we examine (1) to what extent a new epistemic repertoire (Ankeny & Leonelli, 2016) is forming from interdisciplinary collaboration in the nascent SSbD research community, and (2) how SSbD’s concepts act as constraints or generative elements in forming productive capacities for the research community. We draw on surveys, interviews, fieldwork, and first-hand experience as socio-technical researchers embedded in an SSbD consortium. By analysing the repertoire around SSbD, we identify the epistemic, social, and material elements that converge around it and show how the mobilisation of these elements keeps safety, sustainability, and design as objects of contestation or of compromise for socio-technical change. Finally, we reflect on how SSbD can become a generative and productive program for reimaging technoscience.