DIGTCOM Centre for Digital and Green Transformation in Cities and Communities

Aarhus University Seal
Grøn KBH
Responding to contemporary global crises, DIGTCOM is a research centre for the digital, social, and green transformation of society.
How can emerging digital technologies support sustainable transformations in cities and communities?
How can we codesign AI models and systems based on local knowleges and lifeworlds?
What does the green transition mean in and for diverse communities?
What data do we need to build open and flexible infrastructures for the smart city?

Responding to contemporary socio-ecological crises, our mission is to explore and shape digital and green futures through research, practice, and design together with diverse partners and actors in communities, cities, and societies. As a collective, we engage in core societal challenges through central themes of sustainable futures, urban transformations, civic resilience, and cultural and creative practices. 

DIGTCOM is a research centre for the digital, social, and green transformation of society. Aiming to create societal impact across different scales, we explore the role and design of emerging technologies and data-driven systems for diverse communities based on everyday practices of the digital transformation.

This involves responsible approaches to everyday automation and algorithmic systems for sustainable urban mobility, energy, and data infrastructures in the green transition. It involves exploring the role of emergent social networks and sites of civic resilience for enabling inclusive sustainable societies, as well as the potentials of culture and creativity as drivers of social and green change in society.

Sustainable Futures

Participatory AI for Alternative Sustainable Futures

Emerging AI technologies are designed based on Westernised values, principles and models of prediction that challenge local participation, agency and empowerment. Addressing the urgent need for humanistic research to drive technological innovation and green transitions, the P-AIA project develops design anthropological approaches to explore and co-design decolonising forms of AI based on diverse local values, knowledges and lifeworlds in Namibia and Denmark.

Sustainable Futures

Rethinking Design for Inclusive Digital Futures

Inclusive and sustainable digital futures call for fundamentally new design competences and practices. DCODE combines advances in engineering, social sciences and humanities to provide the necessary connection between human experience (one-to-one relations) and the societal system (end-to-end relations). In doing so, we position the crafting of agency as foundational to digital design today, just like function was critical to industrial design.

Civic Resilience

Infrastructures and Interfaces of Publics in Urban Space

InfraPublics addresses a gap between journalism studies and smart city research, taking the datafication of urban spaces as an opportunity for journalism to go beyond the “informed citizen” model of its audience. The project maps and evaluates approaches to how journalists, citizens, cities, data providers and civic tech NGOs can work together on a local level to shape infrastructures for civic communication in the connected city.

Urban Transformations

Interoperable Energy Data Spaces

Relying on European common standards, the EU-funded OMEGA-X project aims to implement an energy data space. This will include federated infrastructure, data marketplace and service marketplace, involving data sharing between different stakeholders and demonstrating its value for concrete energy use cases while guaranteeing scalability and interoperability with other data space initiatives. 

Culture & Creativity

Craft Revitalization Action for Future-proofing the Sustainable Transition

CRAFT-IT4SD activates the cultural and creative industries towards the green transition by building on the rich cultural heritage and strong creative traditions in Europe. The project revitalizes knowledge, practices and traditional techniques as shared cultural resources for sustainability into a new, customer driven and sustainable creative economy, allowing for micro-sized enterprises to share climate impact data and flourish via an open source and open data platform.

Research Themes

News

Revised 02.04.2025
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Franziska Garms