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Students walk across the campus north. A large red sculpture in the shape of large gears can be seen. © Roland Baege​/​TU Dortmund

Guest Lecture: From Socio-Technical to Anthro-Digital Systems – Updating our Terminological and Conceptual Toolkit for the Digital (and GenAI) Age

A detailed, illustrative composition split into two distinct, interconnected halves, depicting the evolution from traditional IT networking to advanced, virtualized artificial intelligence. The left half, set against a light, cream-colored background, portrays a physical, networked office environment. Five human professionals are engaged in various tasks at a central table cluttered with cables and equipment. On the left, a man stands, typing on a laptop, while a woman sits working on another laptop. In the center and on the right, other professionals work on laptops and desktop computers. The table is filled with routers, servers, switches, and a chaotic array of cables, forming the tangible network infrastructure. Three illustrative diagrams float above them: a computer network diagram on the left, a hierarchical organizational chart in the center, and another detailed flowchart on the right. A man in the background works on a large rack-mounted server cabinet. A wide, flowing stream of blue, intertwined data lines and digital binary code moves from the network switch on this side across the center of the image to the right. The right half, set against a light blue background, displays a futuristic, virtualized work environment. This half is characterized by virtual holographic displays, advanced visualizations, and artificial intelligence. Five figures inhabit this space, of which four are human experts and two are humanoid robots. The humans are all wearing virtual reality (VR) headsets. A woman on the right and a man in the foreground gesture to manipulate virtual 3D holograms of complex neural networks, data streams, and wave patterns. One humanoid robot stands, looking up and gesturing with a raised hand towards a floating display showing code and data. Another, more detailed humanoid robot stands in the foreground left, observing a woman programming code on a virtual console. The displays show complex graphs, programming code, and abstract mathematical representations. The stream of data flows into the central holographic neural network, representing the transformation and processing of data by AI. The entire scene is rendered in a clean, precise graphical illustration style, with a limited color palette of blues, grays, and creams, and a high level of detail in all technical elements and the interactions of the figures. © Felix Stundzig​/​TU Dortmund, AI generated with Gemini
We warmly invite you to a guest lecture by Andreas Drechsler (Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand).

Topic: From Socio-Technical to Anthro-Digital Systems: Updating our Terminological and Conceptual Toolbox for the Digital (and GenAI) Age

A socio‑technical systems (STS) perspective has been a foundation of Information Systems (IS) research for decades. However, in a time when digital technologies—and human interaction with them—have become ubiquitous, it is worth asking whether deliberately adopting an STS perspective still provides the same analytical value as it once did. At the same time, the growing proliferation of non‑deterministic algorithms, particularly AI, introduces a new class of digital technologies with distinct characteristics and even the potential for autonomous action.

Against this backdrop, the talk introduces a novel conceptual framework: anthro‑digital (A‑D) systems. In this framework, the “anthro” component captures the strength of human roles and influences within a system, while the “digital” component reflects how deterministic the roles of the involved digital systems are. The hyphen represents the interfaces between the human and digital components.

Through several examples, the talk will illustrate how an A‑D systems perspective can help systematically unpack conceptual nuances—such as different forms of human–AI collaboration—as well as terminological questions, for example what a “conversation” between two autonomous AI agents might mean.

Speaker:
Andreas Drechsler is a Senior Lecturer in Information Systems at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. His research and teaching interests include digital architecture and security, organisational agility, higher education teaching approaches for the digital and AI age, GenAI use in knowledge work, and the conceptual and methodological foundations of design science research. He has published more than 50 papers in international journals and conferences.

Date & Location:
Tuesday, 14 April 2026, 1:00–2:00 pm
Physics Building, Room P2‑E0‑414 (AV Room)

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