The first author of this paper is Malte R ö DL, a lecturer in the Department of urban and rural development, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, and a doctoral student in the Institute of sustainable consumption, University of Manchester, UK.

Responsible innovation (RI) has emerged as a research field, which is committed to making people more sensitive to the social value in the process of innovation. However, the academic literature of RI mostly studies a single technology rather than a technical system, which is mostly future oriented, and fails to make clear the use of professional knowledge about past development. This paper proposes a problem focused RI research approach to help researchers and stakeholders develop potential solutions from the perspective of system awareness and historical sensitivity. Then we describe an application of this approach to a one-and-a-half-year interdisciplinary research project on plastics. We show that this approach has produced novel and unexpected research projects, formed new interdisciplinary and interdisciplinary cooperation, and affected some project participants' understanding of the system embedded in their work. Our conclusion is that as long as individual researchers have a moderate willingness to participate, this approach can play two roles: one is to enable experienced researchers to engage in their work more responsibly in the future, and the other is to make scientific research projects more responsive by incorporating social concerns and their historical origins from the beginning.

The approach described in this paper is divided into two stages: problem identification and project implementation. The trigger for their adoption of this approach is that some researchers jointly feel that a set of socio-material practices (or practices) - business practices, private practices or other practices - pose social challenges, so these practices and their social and environmental impacts are controversial.

Problem identification phase. The first step is to identify the historical driving forces leading to these practices through desk research from a systematic perspective (blogger: This paper takes the wide use of disposable medical plastic products and the accumulation of micro plastics in water as an example). This leads to a historical overview, which describes the generation process of controversial practices (practices), including major controversial events listed by timeline.

The second step is to critically examine the above timeline by various stakeholders and researchers of the system.

After everyone has reached a consensus on the systemic issues arising from critical review, the third step is to identify possible systemic leverage points for changing relevant practices.

These leverage points are used as the input of the integration process (step 4). At this stage, researchers and system stakeholders roughly design one or several specific projects to develop innovative social or material solutions.

Project implementation phase. The fifth step is to carefully consider the proposed project, clarify the basic assumptions, and identify the nonlinear dynamic process of the project with the gradual emergence of favorable or unfavorable results.

The sixth and final step is to use the key historical enlightenment obtained in the first stage to explore which scenarios may lead to unexpected consequences, such as social and environmental shocks that people do not want to see. The next thing to do is to try to prevent unexpected adverse consequences.