Understanding and supporting (inter-)professional transformations

Today’s grand challenges like the energy transition and the digital transformation require organizations and their employees to innovate and collaborate across organizational and disciplinary boundaries, on the one hand. And, on the other hand, they require organizations and employees to update or reinvent their professional practice and identity.

To contribute to the grand challenges,  I focus on “understanding and supporting (inter-)professional transformations” as a catalysator for responsible research and innovation. My research builds upon three pillars: (1. pillar) a systemic understanding of societal challenges to turn tensions into development potentials, (2.pillar) a process-oriented perspective on individual and team-based transformations to empower professionals’ interdisciplinary learning and working, and (3. pillar) participative and traceable research and innovation methods, tools and infrastructures to promote suitable, sustainable and justifiable technical solutions.

(1. pillar) Societal challenges are not only ill-defined but they include contradictions between old and new motives or practices. Addressing these contradictions requires taking into account the affected systems and their mechanics. This prevents fixing problems that reside at the surface and promotes identifying what constitutes root causes, whom they involve, and how they unfold over time and impact decision making such as in design of ethical responsible technology or design of sustainable business models. Only by critical reflecting and acting on such questions, we can stop a system from aggravating and make it expand to the better, including the (design of) meaningful human-computer interactions.

(2. pillar) Any successful transformation of a system precedes a transformation of their members as vehicle of change. We must understand the dynamics of these professional transformations in terms of the working and learning of employees, individually and in teams, to be able to support them in facing the grand challenges. For understanding these, it is paramount to not only focus on outcomes but study the process in terms of the underlying working and learning activities. In addition to cross-sectional studies, therefore, longitudinal research methods need to be applied to disclose which patterns of activities are effective, what interplay of individual and team learning is beneficial and how self-directed working and learning develops over time. 

(3. pillar) Tackling societal challenges and promoting transformations necessitate responsible research and innovation that is participatory and traceable. We can only design responsible technological solutions in productive interactions with affected stakeholders in the field. And we can only justify design decisions by basing them on practical and theoretical insights and aggregating evidence for them over time. Design-based (implementation) research has gained popularity, but it lacks design methods that bridge iterations and increase strategic alignment, systematic tools for tracing evidence over iterations, and community-driven infrastructures that scale efforts and engagement beyond organizational boundaries. Addressing these needs aims at improving the efficacy and appreciation of design-oriented approaches.

Understanding and supporting (inter-)professional transformations demands collaboration between disciplines such as computer and learning science, for which the IT:U provides an ideal environment. My focuses on societal challenges and aims at promoting transformations, with the dedication to develop innovative educational technologies and with the motivation of using computational approaches in research on technology-enhanced learning.