Portrait of Professor Paetzold-Byhain
Prof. Dr.-Ing. Kristin Paetzold-Byhain has held the Chair of Virtual Product Development at since July 2021. She was born in 1969 in Saalfeld, Thuringia.
Without the use of the methods and tools that modern information and communication technologies provide us with ... we would not have the variety of products available to us today that not only support us in coping with our everyday working lives, but also provide a multitude of possibilities for designing and managing our private lives. The growing complexity in product development is not only the result of the high functionality of technical systems, but also increasingly of the volatile development environments. On the one hand, IT methods and tools support the mastery of complexity, on the other hand, they provide considerable potential to expand the skills of developers, but must be adapted to the respective context of use. I therefore pursue a systemic approach in my research and teaching. The focus is on the socio-technical system as well as methods and tools for product development. Just like technical systems, socio-technical systems can only develop their functionality if they are used appropriately by people.
Being a professor ... gives me the freedom to deal with new things again and again, to take up innovative ideas and develop them further. In dealing with the most diverse opinions from the most diverse subject areas, you quickly learn that seemingly nothing in the world is linear. I enjoy analyzing such interlinked cause-and-effect relationships, developing cause-and-effect relationships and using them to find solutions in product development. This also comes with a great responsibility, because technologies and their use always have a certain ambiguity. In order to be able to make sustainable contributions to social development from the engineering sciences, you have to be aware of the complex interrelationships and develop them in a targeted manner. This is exactly what I want to convey to students: it's not just about building up a sound specialist knowledge, today an open mindset is also essential in order to be able to solve the problems we face holistically.
Students ... should above all be open to new and different things, enjoy discovering and trying things out and maintain a certain curiosity. Of course, not all the content of the course is equally interesting and exciting, sometimes you just need a bit of stamina. But the feeling of having achieved something makes up for all the effort.
In the future ... we will come a big step closer to automation in product development, but we will then have to take a closer look at the role that people will play in the development processes.
If I could study again ... I would study social sciences as well as engineering.
Excellence ... for me means working with colleagues across disciplines, getting to know and understand their concepts and methods better in order to make them useful for my research.