Technology and Sustainability

Modern societies do not develop in a sustainable way; however today, the call for sustainable development, increasingly fuelled by empirical facts, is widely supported. This becomes manifest in the search for solutions to problems such as climate change and scarcity of resources. In order to reduce sustainability deficits, the social handling of technologies and the societal framework conditions for their implementation need to be taken account of in any analysis. At we explore and assess not only the potential consequences of technologies, but also consider the conditions necessary for specific technologies to contribute to a sustainable development.

Sustainable development is an encompassing ethical approach that includes both the individual and the societal development of humankind together with the natural development. Among the underlying basic values are generational fairness, distributional equity, prevention of risks (precautionary principle), protection of resources, and participation of the population in political decision-making processes. Sustainable development calls for the integration of ecological, social, political, economic and technical aspects, both in a local and a global context. Participatory evaluation processes are particularly important in the process of bargaining about the resulting goal conflicts. TA focussing on sustainability therefore not only depends on cross-disciplinary expertise, but also on procedural competence. intends to contribute to this important challenge.

Sustainability assessments of technologies may lead to results and recommendations with practical relevance only if they include the analysis of user contexts (also those of the future). The contribution of a technology to sustainability heavily depends on the way it is integrated in social usage practices and everyday routines. In this way, technological design becomes a learning process, which is informed by TA-derived knowledge and in which stakeholders as well as laypersons and users of the technology are involved. We need to consider both the whole value creation chain and the life cycle of the technology. In our research we focus on socio-technical areas of particular high relevance for sustainability.

How to integrate into TA studies both scientific expertise and knowledge generated in participatory processes is a central challenge. In the coming years, we plan to explore such integration, inter alia, in the fields of HVAC technologies (heating, ventilation and air-conditioning) and of renewable resources. Current projects focus on the transformation of energy technologies in Austrian households as seen from a user perspective, and on goal conflicts between technical-economic efficiency and societal needs. The latter topic will be tackled on a conceptual level as well as on the basis of case studies such as on technologies for the elderly.

All projects in the area Technology and Sustainability