With a typical goal of enhancing public safety and societal resilience, security technologies can also be difficult to understand and have significant ethical, societal, economic, legal and political implications.

Society is becoming increasingly aware of the role that these technologies play in our lives, including the impacts, both positive and negative. Yet despite this growing awareness, civil society is rarely or restrictively involved during the research and development of security technologies. This limitation undermines the security solutions which can fail to address, or even exacerbate, harmful impacts.

To improve the responsiveness of security research and innovation to ethical and societal impacts and to enhance societal trust in proposed solutions, TRANSCEND aims to better enable individuals, and organisations that speak on their behalf, to participate actively and creatively in the iterative development of civil security research and technology development.