Call for Impact

Pilot funding for Impact Projects for young researchers

How can research impact the concrete realities of people's lives? This is the focus of the first Call for Impact for the year 2024: Early career researchers are given the opportunity to explore how engagement with non-academic communities can look like.

The funding for individual Impact Projects by the Transfer Service of the TU Braunschweig is aimed at early career scientists. They are to be enabled to interact with societal groups in multidirectional and co-creative ways, enriching their own research through new ideas and perspectives.

Out of seven applications, three projects have been selected for funding for the calendar year 2024, with an additional project receiving co-funding from the Braunschweig University Association.

Impact Projects 2024

Research assistant Ayat Tarik from Institute of History and Theory of Architecture and the City (GTAS) is collaborating with two master's students, Jennifer Baus and Burcu Daglayan, in a project called KO:Labor. Together, they are developing and testing participatory methods for conducting low-threshold participation formats in the Schwarzer Berg district of Braunschweig. Their project advocates for community-oriented and sustainable urban development, aiming to promote opportunities for participation and decision-making in urban design processes. The goal is to strengthen the identification with the neighborhood and the sense of belonging for all individuals who live or spend time there.

Post-doctoral researcher Marie Ritter and doctoral student Darien Tartler from the Department of Industrial/Organizational and Social Psychology at the Institute of Psychology aim to develop MeetingHacks, a short-content video format that presents tips from meeting research for practical application. The videos will be presented to individuals from companies, startups, and students, with their needs discussed in a workshop and new insights fed back into research. The knowledge from MeetingHacks can thus be directly applied in everyday work. This project is co-funded by the Braunschweig University Alliance.

To drive sustainable construction through collaborative exchange is the aim of the Impact project led by Postdoctoral Researcher Sandra Rothenbusch from the Department of Industrial/Organizational and Social Psychology at the Institute of Psychology. The project's idea is to bring together stakeholders in the construction industry through "speed-datings" and "fuckup events" on the topics of "sustainable construction" and "sustainable collaboration," enabling discussions, sharing of experiences, and solution approaches on these topics. The discussion outcomes will be visually recorded using Note Sketching and shared via social media.

Doctoral candidate Grace Abou Jaoude from the Institute for Sustainable Urbanism (ISU) plans in her research the development of a web-based tool that analyzes and visualizes various scenarios for the reintegration of urban production to examine their impact on resource efficiency. The tool aims to provide evidence-based information about potential benefits for local manufacturers and their production networks, aiming to integrate them more strongly into urban production.