Principal Investigator: Assoc. Prof. Elif Sürer

Institution(s): METU

Project Summary: The Purpose of the Project is to understand the effects of SUIT technologies on their users, to determine their needs and expectations, and to manage the adaptation process with an approach that includes people. Four Activity Areas are defined to achieve the project goal. The first of these is to ensure the monitoring and coordination of all work packages, ensuring intra-project communication, timely implementation and reporting of activities. The other three are constructed regarding three different situations of the social dimension of advanced technologies. Accordingly, it focuses on (i) understanding people's technological needs and expectations, (ii) how they affect people, and (iii) ways in which they become widespread in social life.

In the field of activity focusing on how technologies affect people, this project aims to identify the needs and problems experienced in advanced technologies for sustainable cities. In addition, in the transition to digitalization, it is aimed to understand the adaptation problems and resilience areas that user groups may experience in the five different areas of communication, transportation, building, waste and environment that the Sustainable Urbanization Through Innovative Technologies Platform focuses on and to define adaptation strategies to digitalization. In this context, the needs will be determined in the survey to be conducted with the user groups determined, and it is envisaged to alleviate the vulnerabilities that may be experienced while adapting to digitalization through focus group studies.

Following this, a study is planned to integrate advanced technology-based tools with social processes. In this study, it is aimed to design in an interdisciplinary process what kind of technological interfaces the transfer of environmental information can combine with spatial experience in virtual and non-virtual environments, and what their algorithm process might be, by using the transformative effect of the relationship that humans enter into with their environment through creative artistic activities.

Finally, the project aims to revitalize the entrepreneurial company ecosystem that will support the increase of advanced technology production for sustainable cities. For this purpose, it is aimed to establish a cooperation platform and increase the social impact by disseminating the outputs of the platform. In this context, in order to contribute to the formation of an entrepreneurship ecosystem that will create an environment of financial, information, data and technical interaction that enables the production and distribution of sustainable high-tech ideas, cooperation training will be provided to the volunteer METU Technopark company group on the subject, cooperation meetings will be organized and the establishment of a cooperation platform will be supported. In addition, written, visual and audio tools will be used to promote the platform to be created in order to increase social impact.

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