Peter Troxler
As a Research Professor at Rotterdam University of Applied Sciences (RUAS), I focus on exploring and shaping the 𝗙𝘂𝘁𝘂𝗿𝗲 𝗼𝗳 𝗪𝗼𝗿𝗸𝗶𝗻𝗴 from both digital and business perspectives. I lead research to identify how organizations can leverage modern digital technologies, such as AI-enabled decision support systems, digital twins for process optimization, and human-machine collaboration, to design work that:
1. Safeguards and improves the quality of working life
2. Ensures humane working conditions
3. Effectively utilizes technological capabilities
With over 25 years of experience bridging technology and human factors, I investigate how collective management and open-source principles can reshape organizational practices. My work spans three key dimensions:
Digital Transformation & Human-Centric Work: Leading research on how organizations can implement emerging technologies while safeguarding and improving the quality of working life.
Technology Implementation & Governance: Studying how communities and systems can be effectively managed through collaborative approaches while ensuring humane working conditions.
Enterprise Architecture for Future Work: Analyzing how organizations can optimize technological capabilities while maintaining a balance between social, technological, and commercial aspects.
My research examines how digital technologies are reshaping organizational practices across industries. I focus on networked cooperation paradigms and business models built on lateral governance and open-source principles, ensuring technological advancement serves human needs.
My multidisciplinary expertise includes:
Academic Research: Six years at ETH Zurich studying industrial psychology and management science, focusing on factory automation, human factors, and integrated management systems. Three years at the University of Aberdeen, applying advanced knowledge technologies in practical settings. Twelve years at RUAS, researching digital manufacturing and making.
Business Consulting: Extensive experience in cluster management, strategy development, and integrated management systems across industry, NPOs, and the public sector.
Practical Engineering: Hands-on experience implementing advanced manufacturing solutions, including robotics integration and CNC automation.
I am passionate about helping organizations to navigate the digital transformation while maintaining human-centric approaches to technology adoption and organizational change. My work consistently aims to ensure that the future of working enhances human potential and dignity.
1. Safeguards and improves the quality of working life
2. Ensures humane working conditions
3. Effectively utilizes technological capabilities
With over 25 years of experience bridging technology and human factors, I investigate how collective management and open-source principles can reshape organizational practices. My work spans three key dimensions:
Digital Transformation & Human-Centric Work: Leading research on how organizations can implement emerging technologies while safeguarding and improving the quality of working life.
Technology Implementation & Governance: Studying how communities and systems can be effectively managed through collaborative approaches while ensuring humane working conditions.
Enterprise Architecture for Future Work: Analyzing how organizations can optimize technological capabilities while maintaining a balance between social, technological, and commercial aspects.
My research examines how digital technologies are reshaping organizational practices across industries. I focus on networked cooperation paradigms and business models built on lateral governance and open-source principles, ensuring technological advancement serves human needs.
My multidisciplinary expertise includes:
Academic Research: Six years at ETH Zurich studying industrial psychology and management science, focusing on factory automation, human factors, and integrated management systems. Three years at the University of Aberdeen, applying advanced knowledge technologies in practical settings. Twelve years at RUAS, researching digital manufacturing and making.
Business Consulting: Extensive experience in cluster management, strategy development, and integrated management systems across industry, NPOs, and the public sector.
Practical Engineering: Hands-on experience implementing advanced manufacturing solutions, including robotics integration and CNC automation.
I am passionate about helping organizations to navigate the digital transformation while maintaining human-centric approaches to technology adoption and organizational change. My work consistently aims to ensure that the future of working enhances human potential and dignity.
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Papers by Peter Troxler
Digital technology manifests two distinct faces: an attractive radiance opening boundless possibilities, alongside a magnetic pull potentially blinding users to its limitations. Digital transformation emerges as a fundamentally "cyber-social" experience that transcends purely technological considerations. The design of digital technologies constitutes a "wicked problem" demanding approaches equal to its complexity.
A critical examination of traditional engineering and design disciplines reveals significant limitations in addressing digital transformation. Engineering methods typically overlook broader social contexts, while design thinking approaches may lack necessary technical precision. Neither discipline independently addresses the cyber-social nature of digital technologies adequately.
The proposed transdisciplinary framework transcends disciplinary boundaries through systematic "boundary crossing" - identifying similarities and differences between disciplines to generate innovative solutions beyond single-discipline capabilities. This approach integrates key digital technologies (micro-electronics, data processing, connectivity), enabling methodologies (vision, participation, experimentation), and philosophical approaches (technology design as experimental ethics).
Cyber-social knowledge production must rest on three principles: recognizing the digital as a cyber-social experience requiring joint optimization of both aspects; implementing transdisciplinary approaches leveraging diverse disciplines; and conducting methodologically thorough and ethically responsible applied research, particularly through experimental ethics practices.
This comprehensive theoretical framework offers a pathway for responsible digital innovation balancing technological capabilities with social considerations, potentially avoiding authoritarian, post-democratic developments associated with technocentric approaches to digital transformation.
Future Workshops are best used in a context where there is scope for action and where collective efforts are required to change a restrictive environment to better suit the needs of its users. Ideally the participants of a Future Workshop are supposed to take responsibility for the expected changes and also given the respective authority and resources to initiate this change.
Future Workshops combine analytical (rational) and creative (intuitive) phases to
1. Analyse a given, current situation,
2. Develop visions of the future and
3. Agree on an action plan how to reach these desired results.
Participants of a Future Workshop thus embark on a cathartic journey, starting by naming the curse of today and the fears of the future, continuing by being allowed to dream and so to overcome the constraints of everyday life and the normative power of the factual, eventually ending up developing and initiating concrete actions towards a desirable and better future.
While carried out under a strict time management regime, Future Workshops are extremely open to any content addressed by participants. ‘Everything said is important’, ‘everyone gets the opportunity to speak’ and ‘everything is recorded’ are the underlying principles for true and equal participation. This is supported by a variety of facilitation techniques.
Future Workshops are instruments of fundamental empowerment. If conducted properly they result in powerful action plans and a high commitment of participants to carry actions through.
Future Workshops also might result in cohesive and effective action against established powerful institutions.
Future Workshops have been employed initially in community settings, in the peace movement, the green movement, etc. Even though the method may have been deployed successfully in business, we hesitate to recommend it for use in a context where ‘disruption’, ‘participation’ and ‘empowerment’ are believed to best not interfere with shareholders’ interests.
Open design has been proposed as the key ingredient to make and discuss circular products in events such as the 'Open Source Circular Economy Days'2 and the 'POC21 Innovation Camp'.3 Open design has become the preferred modus operandi for social design. Increas- ingly, open design inspires the design and manufacturing sectors and their related institu- tions. Premsela, (at the time) the Netherlands Institute for Design and Fashion,4 was a key partner in publishing the volume Open Design Now.5 In 2018, the Danish Design Centre ran a program for designers and manufacturers to grow their business 'by going open source'.6 Open design, and research about open design, have predominantly been obsessed with the characteristics of open, legal frameworks that would facilitate the openness of design, the control that designers would need to relinquish, and the open access to design resources that everyone would receive.7 However, less attention has been paid to how communities of multiple actors might self-organize in order to create, build, share, and preserve those open design resources.
In this article, we trace open design back to its roots and – by building on experiences from a recent open design initiative as well as research into open design practices – we relate the 'how to organize' question of open design to earlier theories of common, shared resources.