Taking the guiding principle that technology figures as a "material dispositive", which shapes, influences, and characterises social interaction and society at large, the Research Training Group focusses on the interplay of technology and space. Technology obviously bears an impact on existing spatial arrangements and intervenes in space constitutions of various kinds. Technology and space relate to each other in arenas such as design offices, households, airplane cockpits and urban areas. In addition, technology generates completely new spaces, e.g., cyberspace and built environments.
The general aim of the Research Training Group is to develop a topology of technology based on the twofold assumption that technology essentially shapes spatial arrangements and creates conditions which even influence sensory perception and bodily experience. In turn, these human factors contribute to the ways in which technologies are spatially constructed. Technical development is, therefore, an ideal test bed for the investigation of socio-spatial problems and the strategies of coping with these. Interdisciplinary research can address the issue of a technology-shaped and -endowed society in such a way that the importance of spatial aspects, undeniable as they are in the era of globalisation, increasing surveillance, networking and the instantaneous exchange of pictures by mobile phone, clearly comes to bear.
The Research Training Group continues a tradition that is well-established at Darmstadt University of Technology, while at the same time seeks to implement new, innovative elements:
(1) "Large interdisciplinarity," covering engineering, the social sciences and the humanities;
(2) in the field of teaching, new cooperative, bilateral models will be tested;
(3) with the introduction of "summer schools", the international visibility of the programme will essentially be heightened.
With these accentuations, the Research Training Group actively contributes to giving the Darmstadt University of Technology a distinctive image in the fields of interdisciplinary technology research and postgraduate training.
DFG Programme
Research Training Groups
