For the third time, the Office of Educational Innovation and University Didactics is organising a joint lecture series on the topic of sustainability together with Prof. Dr. René Fahr 's department in the winter semester 2024/25. The lecture series is entitled "UPB for Future" and is aimed at students of all disciplines and study phases, employees and the interested public. The ecological, social and economic dimensions of sustainability are addressed and discussed in weekly changing lectures.
Vehicles, machines, household appliances - engineers develop a wide range of technical systems. In doing so, they play a key role in a sustainable future: if they manage to realise the use of resources in cycles, people, the environment and the climate are protected. Interdisciplinarity, complexity and networking are increasing all the time. What do "circularity" and "sustainability" mean? Which methods, models and tools help to realise these goals? We focus on three areas: The course is set in strategic product planning. Model-based systems engineering provides models to make sustainability tangible. And digital tools such as data rooms and artificial intelligence are increasingly characterising practice.
About the speakers:
Prof Dr Iris Gräßler has held the Chair of Product Development at the Heinz Nixdorf Institute at Paderborn University since 2013. She gained her doctorate in 1999 and habilitated in 2003 at the Chair of Production Systems, Machine Tool Laboratory at RWTH Aachen University. During her thirteen-year management career at Robert Bosch GmbH, she was responsible for product development, production systems and change management. She sees engineers in the key role of realising sustainable products in an economically viable way.
Dr Jens Pottebaum has been a senior engineer at the Chair of Product Creation at the Heinz Nixdorf Institute at Paderborn University since 2015. He received his doctorate from Paderborn University in 2011. As an engineering computer scientist, he researches and teaches digital and virtual product creation. He takes on coordinating roles in national and European research networks such as RepAIR, ANYWHERE, CREXDATA and Decide4ECO. He is convinced that sustainability will be an inspiring feature of technical products in the future and therefore a success factor for companies.
