Poetics of Modelling -- A Participatory Approach to Energy Transition

• Applicants: Professor Dr. Veit Hagenmeyer; Professor Dr. Klaus Stierstorfer
• Subject Area: European and American Literary and Cultural Studies ; Automation, Mechatronics, Control Systems, Intelligent Technical Systems, Robotics
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 550232575

The proposed project is an unusual collaboration between literary theory, energy systems design and technology assessment, developed around the concept of the ‘model’. Its aims are threefold: First, it closes a substantial gap in theoretical model research – the dimension of aesthetic modelling – by means of developing a proper model aesthetic. It secondly highlights drastic deficiencies which result from the practical model communication between scientific-technological modelling and its application – by establishing a practicable critique of modelling. And it thirdly provides the basis for a transdisciplinary mode hermeneutics, which can decisively improve the evaluative and prognostic functions of technology assessment. As this research will be carried out in the intercommunicative context of the association of reality labs at KIT, its triad of modelling aesthetics, hermeneutics and critique will at the same time contribute to a meta-reflection on the conception of the ‘reality lab’ as a well as of practical reality lab research. This project thus closes the increasingly precarious gap between research in modelling practice, philosophy of sciences approaches to modelling research and technological prognostics by a techno-poetic knowledge calculus which prioritizes the aesthetic design of energy models as a central factor, if not truly the missing link, in the collaboration between model designs derived from techno-informatic and techno-social considerations. It mainly addresses the medial representation and communication of technical modelling. The project is special in that it stands out from traditional lines of research on questions of modelling as well as of research on reality labs in the following respects: first, as a revision of the technical concept of models on the grounds of aesthetics and poetics; second, with its markedly interdisciplinary approach, by means of which the object – modelling as aesthetic agent of energy transition – is established; third, because of the decisively participatory research context of the reality lab, which reflects aspects of science communication as factors of the disciplinary epistemic design; and fourth, on the grounds of the development of specific model counselling underwritten by the communication profile of technology assessment. Model aesthetics thus informs and enhances the communication of disciplinary discourses and technology assessment in the sense of an ethics of knowing, which simultaneously revises the sociology of knowledge of the cultural technique of modelling. Expected research outcomes will make a sustainable contribution to the process of energy transition as a whole, and in particular to the improvement of modelling processes, to the problem of participatory modelling, to the understanding of modelling judgements and to the transparency of the communication of the reach and limits of modelling theory.

• DFG Programme: Reinhart Koselleck Projects