Research group: Co-laborative research and innovation

Focus: How can eye tracking be implemented in gaming? How do gamers perceive privacy, and how does the use of eye tracking in gaming affect this perception?  

Goals:  1.) Test the potential of eye tracking in VR gaming outside of standardized laboratory situations.

2.) Conduct an interview study on gamers' concepts of privacy and attitudes toward privacy.

3.) Initiate a mutual dialogue with gamers.

Participants: Visitors to the Gamescom computer games fair in Cologne and the PRETINA project team.

Implementation: Interested visitors to the trade fair are invited to play a VR game. In this game, they take on the role of a wizard's apprentice who must tidy up the wizard's laboratory. As the players explore the laboratory, their eye movements are measured and analyzed.

After the game, a qualitative guided interview takes place in which participants learn about the analysis results obtained during the game and can reflect on their attitudes toward privacy.

Céline Gressel, Theresa Krampe

Focus: Budding craftspeople and engineers explore together with robotics developers how robots could change their everyday working lives. 

Goal: Introducing vocational students to the latest robotics research and discussing ethical and social aspects of autonomous robotics.

Participants: Vocational students from IGMH Mannheim, researchers from FZI Informatik Karlsruhe and IZEW, employees of TECHNOSEUM Mannheim.

Implementation: In an ethical role play, vocational students came into direct contact with a construction site robot of the future. The robot received orders from the students and carried them out in a constructed construction site environment. The robot's functions, limitations, possibilities and also social and ethical aspects were outlined in an exploratory manner and fed back to the robot's developers. Questions were explored in dialog to what extent the interface is intuitively understandable, but also what feelings the interaction with such a machine can evoke. 

Aline Franzke

Focus: How do researchers in the Engaged Program of Science and Technology Studies navigate their work between observation, collaboration and intervention and the associated opportunities and tensions? 

Goal: The intervention aimed to embark on a speculative, playful and creative joint search for new research methods. Space was created for collective self-reflection and peer support.

Participants: International researchers in the field of Science and Technology Studies

Implementation: The intervention took place as part of the annual conference of the European Association for the Study of Science and Technology (EASST) 2024 in Amsterdam. It was part of the session “Observation, collaboration, intervention. Navigating tensions and opportunities of engaged methodologies”. The intervention interrupted the academic discussion formats by offering the participants large pictures of various real tools as well as scissors, glue, pens and plasticine on a high table ensemble. Participants were invited to use the materials to create speculative tools for engaged methodologies.

Mone Spindler

Focus: How does the project development phase affect the success of incorporating ethical, legal and social aspects into technology development projects?

Goal: Researching together with actors in the field and offering space for collective self-reflection and networking.

Participants: Researchers who want to make ethical, legal and social aspects relevant in technology development projects, project sponsors, funding bodies 

Implementation: Inspired by experimental design methods, a traveling research box was designed. Ten of these were sent to the participants by post and subsequently evaluated. The boxes contain deliberately analog, haptic and playful materials for researching and reflecting on key topics identified in a kick-off workshop with the participants. For example, the box contains a card game on the role of putting together the project team, which can be used to test and reflect on team constellations and the associated balancing processes.

Further information: Überblick über die in den Forschungsboxen enthaltenen Materialien

Céline Gressel,

Jacqueline Bellon

Focus: What ethical, legal and social aspects can be recognized in technical artefacts?

Goal: Involve citizens in the discussion on ethical, legal and social aspects of new technologies and integrated research

Participants: Citizens and researchers who want to make ethical, legal and social aspects relevant in technology development projects.

Implementation: As part of the 3rd Integrated Research Conference at the TECHNOSEUM Mannheim, citizens were invited to choose a researcher to take part in the conference under the motto “Pick your scientist!”. Together, the resulting tandems were able to view the TECHNOSEUM's exhibition on the history of technology and discuss their respective perspectives on the ethical, legal and social aspects of new technology and integrated technology development in a deliberately informal and non-structured one-to-one discussion. 

Further information: https://integrierte-forschung.net/rueckblick-fachkonferenz-digitalisierte-lebenswelten-und-integrative-technikentwicklung/ 

Jacqueline Bellon, 

Céline Gressel

Focus: How do researchers experience the influence of research funding concepts and formats on the success of integrated research? What questions and wishes do funding bodies have for researchers?

Goal: The aim of the intervention was to bring researchers and funding bodies/project sponsors who want to implement integrated research into a fictitious dialog about structural opportunities and difficulties. The researchers' relationship of dependency was to be undermined for a moment by creative means. 

Participants: Researchers from the field of integrated research and employees of project sponsors

Implementation: The “Write a letter to your funder” intervention took place as part of the Integrated Research 2023 symposium. The participants were invited to write a letter to their funder/project sponsor. For this purpose, they were provided with a letterhead with prepared fields in which the sender and recipient could be entered. The deliberately open subject line “What I would like to tell you” encouraged them to write their own concerns. This resulted in 18 letters containing opinions, experience reports and constructive criticism. These were made available to employees of project sponsors to read, who in turn were able to write responses to the researchers.

Focus: How could and how should integrated research be organized in the future?

Goal: At the end of the first two sub-clusters of the Integrated Research Cluster, instead of making recommendations to funding bodies and researchers, we speculatively imagined integrated research into the future in order to create a playful momentum for change through co-laborative, fictional future design.

Participants: Staff of the Integrated Research Cluster and researchers from the field of integrated research

Implementation: A speculative intervention on the future of integrated research was carried out at the 4th Symposium on Integrated Research “Mensch-Technik-Verhältnisse transdisziplinär reflektieren und gestalten”. For this purpose, fictitious observations from the future that were as concrete as possible were formulated, presented, discussed and expanded upon, outlining what integrated research could or should look like in 2040. 

Further information: The “observations from the future” can be downloaded here as a PDF.