| Events | Collaboration | Lecture series: Living Labs and Regulatory Sandboxes: The politics of testing digital innovations at small scale
3 July 2024
Zoom

Lecture series: Living Labs and Regulatory Sandboxes: The politics of testing digital innovations at small scale

This year's public lecture series on digitalisation is specifically dedicated to the topic of digital sustainability.


Speaker: Sebastian Pfotenhauer (TUM)

Digital innovation — from AI tools to autonomous vehicles and maintenance robotics — increasingly mobilize real-world experimentation for technology development. Concepts such as living labs, test beds, regulatory sandboxes, among others, are often considered low-risk and inclusive forms of testing socio-technical transformations at small scale and with public participation. At the same time, their proliferation raises questions concerning risks, the ethics of experimentation, and the path dependencies ensuing from such sites. In this lecture, Sebastian Pfotenhauer discusses the use of living labs and sandboxes in the context of digital transformations. Using examples from a variety of technical domains — medical AI, mobility, robotics — we will talk about the trade-offs between testing and democratizing innovation, between scaling and situating innovations, as well as the representativeness and legitimacy of such approaches. 

About the Series

The Department of Computer Science at the CIT School of the Technical University of Munich is organising a public lecture series on the topic of digitalisation in collaboration with bidt. This year, the topic of digital sustainability will be examined from the perspective of different disciplines in order to achieve an overarching and interdisciplinary understanding of the subject matter.