Workshop: Impacts of technology for sustainability
- Date: 26 August 2025, 09:00–12:00
- Location: Ångström Laboratory
- Type: Workshop
- Organiser: UUniCORN
Introducing new technologies to promote sustainability does not always bring the expected results. Sometimes paradoxes arise. We want to deepen our understanding of embedded contradictions that cannot be avoided, only managed. Welcome to an interdisciplinary workshop within the UUniCORN initiative, on august 26 at Ångström Laboratory!
This workshop aims to form working groups that can develop joint research projects for which we will seek external research funding.
We invite researchers from Uppsala University to a multidisciplinary workshop focusing on research about paradoxes arising when new technologies intended to promote sustainability are introduced
Date: August 26, 2025
Place: Ångström Laboratory, Room 101150 (Map to Ångström Laboratory).
Would you like to participate in the workshop? Sign up here!
The last day to register is June 20.
Program
09.00 Introduction: Paradoxes in Technology for Sustainability.
09.30 Open-space session to chisel out relevant and interesting research initiatives, including a coffee break.
11.40 Summary and closing session in plenary.
12:00 End
More on the subject
Two examples of relevant paradoxes:
The Repair Paradox
The more we attempt to "repair" the world through technical or organisational solutions, the more we tend to reinforce the system, assumptions, and ways of thinking that caused the problems in the first place (Stirling, 2010).
The Rebound Effects
A paradox in the sense that improved resource efficiency reduces the cost of a particular product or service, which in turn leads to increased use of that product or service, thereby reducing or wiping out the environmental gains that would otherwise have been achieved (Hertwich, 2005).
References: Hertwich, E. G. 2005. Consumption and the rebound effect: An industrial ecology perspective. Journal of industrial ecology, 9(1‐2): 85-98.
Stirling, A., 2010. Keep it complex. Keep it complex. Nature, 468(7327): 1029–1031.
More information
Here you can read more about the research project "Impacts of technology for sustainability".