TUDiSC-Projects

• Prof Dr Simon Meier-Vieracker (Chair of Applied Linguistics)
• Prof Dr Alexander Lasch (Chair of Linguistics and History of German)
• Prof Dr Stefan Scherbaum (Chair of Psychological Methods and Cognitive Modelling)

DiaDisK asks about the disruptive impacts of digitization in the institutions central to the knowledge society: university, library, and school. To this end, it focuses on institutions localized in Dresden (Open Science@TUD, SLUB, and Universitätsschule). Using a combination of linguistic and psychological approaches, the project investigates how the established and monopolistically organized knowledge-infrastructural regulations in these fields are transformed into open knowledge systems and how the disruptive and innovative potentials of digitization are constructed and interpreted both on a discursive and individual level. By developing and testing an integrative methodology for analyzing disruptive phenomena and their interpretations, which systematically intertwines their cognitive-affective anchors with their discursive-epistemic imprints, the project offers approaches for empirically comprehensively validated change management.

• Prof Dr Sebastian Pannasch (Chair of Engineering Psychology and Applied Cognitive Research)
• Prof Dr Anne Lauber-Rönsberg (Chair of Civil Law, Intellectual Property, Media and Data Protection Law)
• Prof Dr Thorsten Strufe (Honorary Chair of Privacy and Network Security)

• JProfessor Dr. Katharina Kaesling, LL.M. (Junior Professorship for Civil Law, Intellectual Property, especially Patent Law, and Legal Issues of AI)

The interaction with digital user interfaces in the internet contains more and more decision architectures that are in contradiction to the actual interests of the users.
These so-called dark patterns are developed to trick users into doing things. Research in the DESIGNATE project is based on the collaboration between computer science, psychology and legal science in order to address the following questions: (i) To what extent is it possible to influence behavior through selected dark patterns? (ii) Design and effectiveness analysis of software-based countermeasures. (iii) Investigation of the legal admissibility of dark patterns and the need for additional legal regulation.

• Jun-Prof Susann Wagenknecht, PhD (Junior Professorship in Micro-Sociology and Techno-Social Interaction)
• Prof Dr Sven Engesser (Chair of Communication - Science and Technology Communication)
• Dr Johanna E. Möller (Chair of Communication - Science and Technology Communication)
• Dr Stefan Köpsell (Chair of Privacy and Data Security)

The project investigates disruptions of privacy in the Internet of Things. The project aims to conceptually research on disruptions and disruptive changes both conceptually and empirically. The project focuses on privacy infringements involving third parties —infringements, we argue, that harbor a particularly high potential for disruption as they affect, disturb, or even destroy existing orders of privacy. Taking its cue from current privacy research, the project pursues a context-sensitive, relational, interdisciplinary, and methodologically plural approach. It combines sociological, communication, media and technology perspectives on privacy. Project partners interweave and complement subject-specific expertise by means of three studies, i.e., (1) an ethnographic situation analysis, (2) a semi-automatic content analysis and (3) the development and evaluation of prototypes.

• Jun-Prof Dr Moritz Ingwersen (Chair of North American Literature with a Focus on Future Studies)
• Jun-Prof Dr Nicole Raschke (Junior Professorship in Geography Education and Environmental Communication)
• Prof Dipl-Ing Melanie Humann (Chair of Urbanism and Design, Institute of Urbanism and Urban Studies)

The project provides an integrative investigation of narratives, educational strategies and designs of transformative place-making processes in the face of the climate crisis and its effects on concrete life worlds. The concepts of place, agency, and future will provide the foundation for the development of a theoretical-conceptual framework that examines the situatedness of agency as the basis for emancipatory paths toward more just and sustainable futures. By analyzing processes of transformative place-making in and through ecotopian narratives, urban design and learning environments, this project seeks to propose paradigmatic place relations, which are then critically developed and mobilized in dialogue with social actors outside of the university. This project aims to make a theoretical and empirical contribution to interdisciplinary and self-reflexive perspectives on societal and cultural transformation. Guided by an understanding of the climate crisis as a profound systemic disruption of habitual relations between situated subjects and their environments, this project is invested in the recognition that mobilizing change requires critical attention to the entanglements among social, cultural, material, political, affective and economic structures.

• Dr Solvejg Nitzke (Chair of Media Studies and Modern German Literature)
• Martina Pieperhoff (Chair of Entrepreneurship and Innovation)
• Prof Dr Jens Krzywinski (Chair of Industrial Design Engineering)

Disrupt!Research is an exploratory project that investigates science communication under the conditions of disruption in order to develop and test formats of interdisciplinary collaboration within and beyond the university. We aim to conceptualize and explore disruptivity as an integral part of communication in and about the sciences and humanities. To reach these goals, Disrupt! Research connects three disciplines: Literary and Cultural Studies, Design, as well as Social and Economic Sciences.

The project is based on the assumption that scientific communication (internal, interdisciplinary and public) is a central arena of disruptivity, where conflicting interests, objects and spaces of research and communication could realize their disruptive potential at any time. However, disruption is not only present as a destructive element in the constellations we investigate. Instead, they reveal productive potentials for innovative collaboration.

• Prof Dr Stefan Scherbaum (Chair of Psychological Methods and Cognitive Modelling)

• Prof Dr Moritz Schulz (Chair of Theoretical Philosophy)

• Prof Dr Marc Wolfram (Chair of Spatial Development and Transformation, Director of Leibniz Institute of Ecological Urban and Regional Development - IOER)

Disruptions are crucial for accelerating societal sustainability transformation. The emergence, characteristics and effects of disruptions are however significantly related to the role of outsiders i.e. individuals defending a position diverging from the majority Therefore this project aims to develop a comprehensive understanding of the relationship between outsiders and disruptions, as well as their impacts on transformations. With a view to societal development goals it develops new basic knowledge that enables using the transformative potential of outsiders while preventing their possible marginalization, radicalization or obstructive effects. The research design combines approaches from psychology, philosophy and transformation studies in an interdisciplinary multi-level analysis of cognitive, institutional and normative aspects - from the individual to societal level. Empirically a comparative study between four cities is being conducted in cooperation between TUD and IOER.

• Prof. Dr. Marianne Kneuer (Chair of Political Systems and Comparative Politics)
• Prof. Dr.-Ing. Dr. h.c. Gerhard Fettweis (Vodafone Chair - Mobile Communication Systems)

The project ‘Digital Disruption and Disinformation: Challenges to Institutional Legitimacy and Trustworthiness’ systematically examines the repercussions of digital induced information disruption for political institutions, their trustworthiness and legitimacy. This project will empirically analyze these questions regarding four dimensions of information (provision, acquisition, dissemination, and accuracy). It will expand knowledge on the disruption of the digital public sphere and on the impact of this disruption on the institutional dimension of democracy.