Principal Investigators

What is your contribution to the profile initiative?

I contribute my expertise in sustainability management and digital transformation, particularly with regard to organizational strategies and measuring the impact of transformation processes. Together with colleagues, I work on concepts for how organizations can use digital technologies to achieve sustainability goals and how sustainability principles can guide the development and use of digital technologies.

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How did you come to this topic?

Together with my team in occupational and organizational psychology and at the Center for Better Work, I looked at how social interaction processes in organizations are changing as a result of flexibilization and digitalization—from team processes to leadership and organizational change. One overarching question is: How can the relational dimension of work be preserved when we rarely or never meet face-to-face anymore?

How did you come to this topic?

The central focus of my research is society's response to ecological problems—especially climate change. I am interested in how ecological crises lead to processes of social change and how this gives rise to new forms of coordination, but also to new social conflicts.

What is your contribution to the profile initiative?

On the one hand, I contribute my expertise as a language technologist to the profile initiative—especially in dealing with large language models. We use these models in discourse analysis on multimodal corpora and to predict possible future scenarios, among other things. On the other hand, we at HCDS support all researchers in the initiative with digital questions related to their projects.

How did you come to this topic?

My entry into research on digitally sustainable transformations began with the topic of digital social innovations. I am interested in how technologies can be designed for the common good in order to address social and ecological challenges—especially from the perspective of marginalized groups.

What is your contribution to the profile initiative?

I conduct research on interaction dynamics in groups and their influence on individual and collective processes that are central to transformation processes. In the profile initiative, I contribute this perspective to examine how digital and sustainable transformations in organizations can be shaped and supported through communication.

How did you come to this topic?

I have been researching this topic since around 2008, when companies began to allow fewer business trips and travel during the global financial crisis, which resulted in considerable energy cost reductions in addition to financial savings. At the same time, the question arose as to whether “virtual working” or virtual conferences could make work much more sustainable. Much of what we now call twin transformation began back then—the use of digital innovations to achieve sustainability successes in addition to efficiency gains.

What is your contribution to the profile initiative?

My research touches on the effectiveness of regulatory measures in both the area of sustainability and in digital and technological transformation. The key question is: how can the state most effectively support these two fundamental transformations of our society? From this question, it is only a small step to ask about the synergies between the two processes, the twin transformation. How can technical innovations serve the sustainable transformation of the economy? And, conversely, how can sustainability considerations be taken into account in technical innovations such as artificial intelligence? And how can the state help by setting intelligent regulations? These are questions I explore in this forum.

How did you come to this topic?

My research is always guided by the question of how the potential of digitalization can be harnessed to enable and sustain positive change. At the same time, however, it is necessary to weigh up the negative, often unintended effects. What interests me most about the profile initiative is the interdisciplinary exchange and the connection between different perspectives. I contribute my expertise in various application contexts, from civil disaster control to the empowerment of employees in large companies.

What is your contribution to the profile initiative?

As a professor of human-computer interaction, I am interested in understanding what future human-machine interactions will look like. I aim not only to study these interactions but also to shape their development, with the goal of enabling people to use technology in ways that are effective, efficient, satisfying, and sustainable.

How did you come to this topic?

As a professor of data science, I have several years of experience in interdisciplinary projects on plain language and responsible AI. Combining these two fields opens up new perspectives on how language-based AI technologies can contribute to inclusion and digital sustainability.