“Dr Plupp is your child’s best friend. To check on vitamin and mineral level, all your child needs to do is remember to blow in the tube every morning! Immediately, this handy hand-held doctor identifies any possible deficiencies and releases nano-encapsulated substances to remedy the situation. With just another inhale through the tube, your child has everything they need to develop healthily.”

Evidently, Dr Plupp is not yet a product we can buy at the pharmacy. Nevertheless, citizens taking part in the NANO2ALL citizen dialogues hosted by Ecsite members (from April to June 2017) imagined that we might encounter objects like it in the future.

Several objects from the future were imagined and physically built by citizens as a point of entry into discussions around societal engagement on nanotechnology. Narratives built around the object, focussing on its function and impact in particular contexts, supported discussions of needs, concerns and values that could be taken on board for further discussions with multi-stakeholders.

This creative approach has great potential in stimulating visitors’ imagination about the future and help them engage with the future in various ways.

Thirty-seven objects imagined by citizens can now be explored on the NANO2ALL website's new “Made by citizens” page. For more information about using this type of dialogue methodology in your activities, consult the document available below.