European Roundtable Sustainable Digital Environments

The ongoing digital transition is inducing a rapid change to social, environmental, and economic structures in all domains of life. Up to now, much research and funding has been allocated to technology development. Social science research, reflexive research, and transdisciplinary processes are comparably neglected and only focusing certain aspects (such as privacy, loss of jobs etc.). Against this background, Profs. Scholz, Parycek, and Steiner (Transdisciplinarity Lab Sustainable Digital Environments, Department of Business and Globalization, Danube University Krems, Austria) are launching a series of Roundtables in Japan, North-America, Europe (and eventually South America) which look at the digital transition from a sustainability science perspective. The goals of the workshops are to 1. Relate and structure research on sustainable relationships between human and digital environments 2. To think about what aspects asks for what type of research to anticipate, avoid, or manage unintended side effects, i.e., Unsee(ns) 3. To reflect what partners of industry, business, government, NGOs, or the public at large would be interested in co-designing transdisciplinary processes in which science and practice learn about sustainable use of digital technologies Though the roundtables factually target transdisciplinary processes, the 2017 Expert Roundtables will focus the inner science perspective (as it has been expressed by 1. and 2.). This is due to the goal of finding a structure (e.g., in line with research and approaches of the Science Technology Society domain) which allow to link technical with social and other perspectives, to relate the different scales of Unsee(ns) and their interaction (finally from the level of the individual to the level of human species). A specific critical question in this context reads what role the emerging Sustainability Science may play and in what way transdisciplinary and socio-ecological research on SDE may be anchored.