Generation Z and Beyond: Co-evolution of Human Capabilities and Intelligent Technologies in the 21st Century (GenZ)

What are the everyday human competences and capabilities needed to live, learn to live and learn to learn in the society that is driven by intelligent technologies?

What competences will make possible positive co-evolution of humans and new technologies in the emerging digital era? What are the everyday capabilities that are needed to live, learn to live and learn to learn in societies driven by intelligent technologies? How do humans live, learn and interact with, around and even inside future digital technologies? What are the “seen but unnoticed”, often non-exceptional and routine ways in which technologies are integrated in our lives. How will different learning, interaction and communication processes be interconnected, researched and understood with new digital and intelligent technologies? How can these core human processes by supported by new technologies?

These are some of the questions we ask in the GenZ theme co-evolution. The theme focuses specifically on the entanglement of new digital technologies and human everyday life. We cannot just assume that digital technologies automatically improve the quality and conditions of life; technologies are possibilities rather than necessities. With research targeting the above questions, the ‘co-evolution’ theme aims to explain how we can strengthen humans to live rewarding and valued lives in the digital communities of the future. It will form the foundation for exploring and explaining the features that will empower humans and enable positive co-evolution between humans and intelligent technologies. Indeed, what if the digital future was not driven by digital technologies but by humans?

Researchers: Sanna Järvelä (theme leader), Pentti Haddington, Jonna Malmberg, Noora Hirvonen

How can human sciences contribute to boundary breaking that enables ambitious and interactive human-technology development in intelligent socio-technical futures?

Who are the ones to co-create digital solutions for the future? How humans can be empowered to participate in the co-creation of digital environments to make the best out of it? What human-centricity means in digital transformation? How digitalization can create value and serve human beings in our everyday life?

The co-creation theme focuses on the creative, interactive processes of how people participate and collaborate in the shaping and making of the digital futures, taking place as part of their everyday lives and practices at work as well as during leisure time. We acknowledge that such processes are always value-laden and political, and ethical issues are always intimately intertwined with them. We appreciate the emerging forms of co-creation, collaborative innovation, participation, design and making that reconsider the traditional understandings of the roles of users and designers and the traditional contexts of technological innovation. Approaches that place emphasis on people’s empowerment and inclusion in designing, shaping, innovating and co-creating intelligent socio-technical futures are of interest. The complex intertwining of value co-creation and digitalization is under examination. Particularly GenZ aims at understanding and strengthening how human sciences and humans can better contribute to digitalization and to defining how emerging technologies shape the society and the future.

What if digital future would be co-created by all of us?

Researchers: Netta Iivari (theme leader), Satu Nätti, Simo Hosio, Marianne Kinnula

How can co-creation be used in forming value-creating resilience and economic development in ecosystems that use intelligent technologies?

What makes societies, cities, communities or businesses and their networks resilient? How human resilience is impacted by digital technologies and what potential roles new technologies can play in resilience planning? How could digital technologies and humans co-create socio-economic development and wellbeing that would lead humanity to sustainable future?

These are some of the big questions of the GenZ resilience theme. For us resilience refers to the capacity of a human system, such as an individual business, business sector, local community or wider society to absorb disturbance and reorganize their functionality while undergoing a change or even serious shocks. Obviously, these human systems are highly integrated to their material surroundings and global scale processes. In GenZ, we are specifically interested in how resilience is working with new evolving technologies and how these technologies could be utilized for human wellbeing, sustainable lifestyles and better environment. The theme focuses on how people, communities and societies can be made stronger and more resilient as they use and develop intelligent and digital technologies. We understand that the ongoing digitalization and the so-called Fourth Industrial Revolution should not be seen as a technological and technology-driven change alone but a process and opportunity to build more resilient futures. This calls for analyzing different dimensions of resilience in order to develop better technology-based solutions for human-centered development.

Researchers: Rauli Svento (theme leader), Jarkko Saarinen (theme leader), Jaakko Simonen, Siamak Seyfi

GenZ – Economic Resilience research team

Director: Professor Pentti Haddington, Faculty of Humanities, pentti.haddington@oulu.fi

Vice Director: Professor Sanna Järvelä, Faculty of Education, sanna.jarvela@oulu.fi

Lotta Haukipuro, lotta.haukipuro@oulu.fi, tel. +358 440 661 683

Pentti Haddington (Chair), Netta Iivari, Sanna Järvelä, Satu Nätti, Jarkko Saarinen, external member Rauli Svento

Noora Hirvonen, Assistant professor (tenure track), History, Culture and Communication Studies, Faculty of Humanities
Simo Hosio, Associate professor (tenure track), Center for Ubiquitous Computing, Faculty of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering
Marianne Kinnula, Associate professor (tenure track), Human-Computer Interaction and Human-Centered Development (INTERACT), Faculty of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering
Jonna Malmberg, Assistant professor (tenure track), Department of Educational Sciences and Teacher Education & Learning and Educational Technology Research Unit (LET), Faculty of Education
Siamak Seyfi, Assistant professor (tenure track), Geography Research Unit (GRU), Faculty of Science
Jaakko Simonen, Associate professor (tenure track), Department of Economics, Accounting and Finance, University of Oulu Business School.